


like the seas, you live on (in me)

by guiltylights



Series: like the seas, you live on (in me) [1]
Category: One Piece
Genre: ALSO: READ THESE TAGS GUYS, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Gen, I chose "choose not to use any archive warnings" FOR A REASON, M/M, Other, PLEASE READ THE ARCHIVE TAGS, POV Second Person, Post-Canon, a further explanation is found at the start of my fic, exploration of what love between two people could mean, i've been working on this fic for over half a year Please Read It, it's necessary for the premise of the fic, outside pov, so at least read that before deciding whether to read this fic or not, this entire fic is written in second person WHELP, you're a pirate captain with a crew and that's the most important part to know about this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-30
Updated: 2019-07-30
Packaged: 2020-07-27 12:49:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20046307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/guiltylights/pseuds/guiltylights
Summary: You can only watch as the whole thing unfolds itself like a scene in a play. The old man is on his knees in a bitter facsimile of a proposal, struggling to get himself upright, but he only has eyes for the cook, standing stiff and emotionless against the window, face turned away towards the sun and black figure stark and unyielding in the kitchen. The morning sunlight streaming in through the kitchen window suddenly feels too vivid, dreamless and unreal, rendering the old man and the cook’s figures as distant and far away as memory; you feel, instinctively, that somehow this scene in the kitchen will be something that you will remember even years down the road, the smallest things the biggest in their significance, the bright edge of something being struck ringing in your ears.Still not looking away from the window, the cook says, ‘I’m calling Chopper.’On the Sabaody Archipelago, you meet an old man and a cook. The old man is a swordsman, and is aged close to seventy; the cook, however, is young, and doesn't look aged at all.





	like the seas, you live on (in me)

**Author's Note:**

> [Time started: 18th Jan 19, 4.00pm;– ]
> 
> PLEASE READ THIS FIRST BEFORE PROCEEDING WITH THE FIC: in regards to archive warnings, I decided for this fic that I would choose not to use any of them. This DOES mean that, yes, this fic may contain one of the things warned by AO3. The reason why I chose to keep it ambiguous as opposed to outright tagging it is because I believe that helps to add towards the build-up of mystery and pacing, which is something quite quintessential to this particular story. HOWEVER, because I understand that the things AO3 tags for can be triggering and distressing for people, I am giving an option here to [read a spoiler post I have on my tumblr](https://guilty-lights.tumblr.com/tagged/my-fics) about this fic. If you need that before deciding to proceed with this fic, then by all means please read it; if you don't, then you can ignore this link and jump straight ahead. 
> 
> There are some fics that are a labour of love and then there are some fics that are A Labour Of Love. This fic is very much the latter. A big shout-out to my friend and long-time fanfiction partner-in-crime [antikytheras](https://archiveofourown.org/users/antikytheras) for reading through this whole thing and giving me comments despite 1) being incredibly busy and 2) not knowing at all about the premise of One Piece, couldn’t have done it without you spotting my egregious punctuation and grammar errors and with you making snarky comments every section. 
> 
> This fic takes INCREDIBLE liberty with the current ideas in One Piece and runs with it, far into the horizon without looking back. Timeline-wise this fic IS set post-ending but be warned that rather than adapting the fic to a plausible end of One Piece, this fic works the other way around. The end of One Piece has been quite prolifically modeled (unrealistic or otherwise) to suit the premise of this fic. There is a very, very long author’s note attached to the end of this fic to explain it, and so if you’re confused by the end of this fic, do read it. It is very long though. Very Long.

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_‘I’ll do it,’ you say, stepping forward. _

_The doctor looks at you. ‘Do you understand what you’re doing?’ He asks. _

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You arrive on the Sabaody archipelago with ship gun-cannons blazing, anticipation for the future roaring in your soul and unbridled confidence humming in your chest. Halfway through the Grand Line, half a step away from the New World—you’ve heard tales about this sea, this sea so legendary that only two pirate crews to this day have conquered it to bring their captain to victory as Pirate King—and your hope for the future rings loud and clear as high bells at noon, so tight in your chest that you almost think you might die from it. You’re impatient to start on your journey towards the next island, every footstep you land on this archipelago and not on the seas restless in its heartbeat. This is what you’ve always dreamed of. The world, right at your fingertips, with a crew loyal at your back and a high bounty to your name—this is the romance of the future.

And then your crew is devastatingly beaten down by another pirate crew, knocked clear across the archipelago and out of sight by cruel fists and even crueler intentions, and you stop dreaming. The world is heartless in its apathy, you think, and you barely have time to sense and turn your head before an iron-knuckled fist comes swinging your way.

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The throbbing in your temple is the least of your concerns, when compared to the screaming pain in your jaw. Gingerly, you lift your hand and touch the side of your face, at the balled joint located just below your ear—and you wince as the flaring pain erupts like molten lava across your entire face, pressing your tongue against the roof of your mouth to keep from screaming. You’d clench your teeth, but that would probably make the pain even worse, you think.

A hand knocks your own gently away from your face, and then a cool towel is being pressed to your cheek. Without thinking, you lean towards the source, towards the hand that is cupped steadily against your face and holding the towel up. The terrycloth is scratchy, but the cold dampness of the towel is soothing after the searing pain you just felt. Galen had always been good at this, you think almost dreamily, good at soothing hurts and reassuring nightmares and bandaging wounds, and right now seems to be no exception. A wicked good fighter to boot, too. You’re glad he’s your ship’s doctor and your first mate.

And then abruptly, you remember Galen’s face as he had been attacked and beaten down into the ground of the mangrove, his nose broken and his teeth bloodied and the hands that had bandaged your cuts and bruises so many times over the past few months broken and crushed beneath a steel-toed boot, him unconscious and too weak regardless to fight back, and you lurch upwards, panic jackrabbiting in your chest and thrumming through your body because this is not Galen and this is not your ship and this is not somewhere _safe_.

You fall off the bed in your haste to get yourself upright and defensive, sheets tangling around your legs and tripping you up. Your face smashes against a hardwood floor, and the pain in your jaw becomes so great that stars explode in front of your eyes, but you’re a pirate and you have a notoriously high bounty and you didn’t survive the first half of the treacherous journey of the Grand Line seas to be stopped by something as trivial and easy as _pain _and so you wrench yourself upright, ignoring the voice going ‘woah, woah, woah, easy—’ somewhere to your right as your hands blindly find the wall and your body presses itself flat against it. You reach for your guns and find with a panic that they’re not there.

As the white haze of pain clears from your eyes, however, instead of seeing some sort of insidious dungeon or cage like you’d feared, you find yourself standing in the middle of some bedroom instead, the kind with warm whitewashed walls and wooden floorboards and an open window to your left with gauzy translucent curtains that you’ve only seen films about halcyon childhood days wax poetic about. The low golden sunlight streaming in from the window tells you that it is currently late afternoon, and your eyes track the way the sunlight stretches, long-fingered and lazy, across the floor to touch the edges of a tall wooden dresser and a chair next to it. Your heart rate begins to slow down.

But then you notice the shiny black dress shoes standing next to the foot of the bed you just fell out of. You tense again, and your gaze flies up.

The man standing in front of you is tall, lean and narrow, and he’s dressed in a black pressed suit that looks too classy to belong in a place as rustic as this. Blond hair, one side which falls to cover one eye with the other eye revealed to show a strange swirly eyebrow (you try not to stare _too _much—you’re not an asshole, and also you still don’t know where this is and who this is and you don’t want to risk even _more _injury by offending him), and your eyes flick down to see the way the man’s hands are held up in a placating and non-threatening manner, body made deliberately loose and relaxed. The buttons on his yellow dress shirt are unclasped down to the middle of his chest, revealing a sliver of pale skin and what looks to be a scar on the left side over his heart, and the sleeves of his suit are rolled up to his forearms; you note, with surprise tinged with a bit of guilt, the terrycloth clutched in his right hand. He has a cigarette smoking thinly clenched between his teeth.

‘Where is this?’ You manage, not yet relaxing from your position against the wall—because this place may look benign but looks can be deceiving.

‘You’re in Sabaody,’ the man is quick to answer. ‘Grove number Forty-Two, if you want to be specific. You’re in my house, currently—I found you unconscious and nearly dead while I was out doing a food supply run, and I decided to bring you back.’

You eye him warily, but his face is open and honest and you don’t think that he is lying. ‘Who are you?’ You ask.

‘Me?’ The man looks genuinely surprised, as if he hadn't been expecting that question. He straightens up, and with one hand on his hip scratches at his chin. ‘Well, I’m a cook. You can call me that, I suppose. God knows that’s what everybody _else _does in this house.’

You don’t miss the way he neatly dodges the question. But you let it go for now, too immediately preoccupied with finding out the most about the situation you’re currently in, so as to be able to make the best possible plan for getting out should the need arises. ‘Multiple people live in this house?’ You catch on immediately.

‘Just two, actually.’ He corrects, while fiddling with the front of his shirt, buttoning it up in order to look more presentable. ‘But the other one is a muscle-headed brute that has all the manners and the grace of a barbarian, and the disasters and the mess _he _makes easily accounts for a thousand.’

You blink at this brutal statement, so out of place on the man that has so far been nothing but perfectly pleasant and polite; only to jump as a voice echoes from the open doorway on your right, ‘I’ll show you barbaric, you stupid cook. Quit bad-mouthing me in front of a kid.’

You bristle at that and open your mouth to protest—you’re not a _kid, _dammit—but the man that comes up from the staircase and steps through the door instantly makes you click your mouth shut. He’s got muscles like a tank, arms and legs brawny in a way that you know means he’s spent his whole life training to be strong, and you very deliberately do not think about all the ways this man could crush you like pinching off an insect if he so much as decides that you _look_ at him the wrong way. His face is set in a terrifying stony frown, and the corners of this man’s mouth only seems to turn down deeper when he glances in your direction, which does nothing to alleviate your intimidation. His one single eye—the one that is not sealed shut by what looks like an old slash wound—focuses on you much like how a predator might focus on a prey, and involuntarily you flinch; but apparently he deems you not to be a threat, as he turns his back to you to bend over a dresser and rummage in a drawer for some clothes.

In the evening sunlight the man’s short-cropped shock of white and brindled grey hair is streaked in golden. When he turns back around, a shirt held in the crook of his arm, you can see, all the more clearly with the light, how wrinkles are underscored deep into his face like lines on the planes of cragged rock, shadows forming where skin has sunken into folds and creases. Looking at this old man, you suddenly feel very, very small—brazen confidence from the past feeling more now like empty bravado in front of this man, whose back, despite his age, stands strong and sure and prouder than the sky. Maybe because of it. True courage is forged from fire and blood, true dignity from repeated tests of perseverance and mettle, and you know that this man has both.

You shift your feet, nervously, and bump against a tiny bedside table; looking down, you see a lamp and what looks to be a cookbook resting benignly on top of it. You glance up. The old man stares back at you, decidedly unimpressed—and the blond man, the cook, who looks not a day over thirty with his fair unwrinkled skin and lean long figure, merely takes a drag from his cigarette and raises his eyebrow in your direction. They look fairly odd standing together side-by-side like that, and yet they have the air of old friends, comfortable as they are in each other’s presence. So much so that the old man doesn’t even bat an eye when the cook turns his head and blows smoke into his face.

His eyelid does begin to twitch, though, you notice; and from how the cook smirks victoriously in response, you figure that must have been the intention. You know a shit-eating grin when you see one, and this is definitely it.

The blond cook turns his head back to your direction. You realise that you’re still braced against the wall as wary as a cornered animal, and awkwardly you straighten up, your hands falling limply to your sides. You feel kind of stupid, now.

The silence reigns for only a moment. ‘Well, anyway, how about some food first?’ The cook suggests. ‘You’ve been unconscious for a long while—you must be pretty hungry. Eat first, talk later.’

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The cook, it turns out, is not only, well, a cook, but a fucking _phenomenal _one at that. Maybe it’s your hunger talking, since it turns out that you’ve been knocked out cold for a staggering three days straight, but the fried rice with pork chops he whips up within twenty minutes is so goddamn delicious that you polish off your own helping in ten minutes flat before asking for seconds. It’s the best damn thing you’ve ever had in your life. You tell the blond cook so.

When he hears your compliment, the cook grins, wide and proud and delighted like it’s his birthday, but only says, ‘yeah, damn right it is’, in response. Which doesn’t make sense to you. You had paid the compliment only off-handedly, even a little rudely, concerned as you are with the plates of food currently being put out in front of you; and the way the cook had replied had made it seem as though he had thought it no big deal either, confident as he is in his own abilities as a chef. But as you watch while shoveling in another spoonful of rice into your mouth, the cook patters around the kitchen with a gigantic smile on his face, humming under his breath as he prepares what looks to be dessert.

The old man, who has seated himself next to you on the dining table and is guzzling what looks to be a bottle of liquor with a lethal alcohol content—seriously, is that _eighty-percent _you see printed on the bottle—snorts a little. You turn to look at him, a little quizzical, a lot distracted (the dessert the cook is making smells heavenly), and he explains, ‘the cook will pretend that your comments on his cooking don’t really matter, but he actually gets real stupidly happy about them. He’s like a kid.’

You refrain from pointing out that against his what looks to be a million years old the cook _is _basically a literal child, out of politeness and also out of fear for your own well-being. The cook, however, has no such qualms, and immediately whips his head around to snap, ‘what was that, you shithead? I’ll kick your ass any day of the week, I’ll have you know—don’t think I’ll go easy on you just because you look like your bones are going to crumble to dust at any given moment–’

‘Ho ho, is that so, curlybrows, just because you’re all young and sprightly doesn’t mean you’re stronger than me, bring it on—’

As the old man rises from his chair with a clatter, you dart your eyes nervously around the room, unsure as to what you should be doing right now. The door is right behind you. You could probably crash yourself through an adjacent window if push _really _comes to shove; but there’s still, like, half a plate of rice and a whole dessert waiting, so you don’t really want to move and give _that _up right now. Plus, despite the way the cook and the old man are growling at each other, you don’t really sense any real kind of killing intent—irritation, sure, maybe even anger, but they’re fighting the same way family often fight, the way only people who understand and have known each other for years can, and so even as the old man starts the unsheathe one of the swords at his hip and the cook begins to brandish the ladle in his hand, you simply scoot your chair roughly three centimetres to the left and continue eating.

But suddenly, the old man starts coughing. Huge, rattling spasms that shake him from deep within his chest, and you look at him, concerned and just a little bit frightened, as he bends over and hacks violently into his fists, hands clenched so tight that you can see how the skin over his knuckles stretch white and bloodless over bone. The sounds seem like they are scraping themselves out of him, like they’re scooping out his breath and raking out his insides, so that when the old man finally straightens up, looking exhausted and wrung out, he seems almost hollowed out and empty. You stare at him, at the proud set lines of his shoulders as they are thrown back, and suddenly you’re not sure if he’s here at all.

The cook looks stricken.

The old man takes one look at the cook’s face, and his expression hardens. ‘Don’t look like that,’ he growls, gruffly. ‘I’m fine.’

The cook seems to snap himself out of a reverie. ‘I know, idiot,’ he snaps, before he whirls around to finish the dessert garnishing he had previously been preparing. But even from the distance you are at, you can see how the cook’s hands tremble as he arranges slices of fruit in neat patterns.

The old man thumps himself back down into his seat. You glance at him out of the corner of your eye. The old man’s got one hand wrapped around the alcohol bottle, but he makes no move to pick it up back up again, his gaze fixed firmly onto the stiff line of the cook’s back, mouth set in a frown. Call you crazy, but you think there’s something more than concern tugging down the corners of his lips. Gentler than anger, sweeter than guilt; regret is an emotion that you’ve often felt and seen, but you don’t understand why that is the feeling that is settling into the lines of the old man’s face now. As if, inwardly, he is wishing for more than what he knows he has. As if he’s bitter at how the world is too small.

The cook turns back around. His face has smoothed itself back into a pleasant expression, though he’s steadfastly avoiding the old man’s gaze. The cook’s got a tray balanced on one hand. Next to you, the old man picks up the alcohol bottle, and starts chugging again.

‘Dessert time!’ The cook beams, sweeping up your emptied plate of rice before setting another down in front of you with a _clink._ The cake on it looks fucking fantastic, so artfully arranged with sauces and fruit slices and fancy sprigs of leaves that you’re almost afraid to touch it. ‘Don’t stand on ceremony; there’s always more if you want it.’

Then, the cook turns, and unceremoniously dumps another plate in front of the old man. You eye it. It looks about roughly similar to whatever you have on your own plate, except less fancily decorated. The old man grunts in response.

‘Here. Less sweet, like how you prefer it, and I also cut down on the butter and the fat in it because you need to watch your damn health.’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ the old man grumbles, then protests as the cook swipes the bottle of alcohol out of his hands. ‘Hey!’

‘Watching your health also means drinking less alcohol, fuckwit,’ the cook snaps, and finally lifts his gaze to meet the old man’s eyes. ‘I’m not having you dying on me in this house—arranging for your funeral would be a bloody pain.’

The old man settles back into his seat. ‘Tch. Whatever, shit cook.’

The tense atmosphere between the two of them seems to have dissolved. You turn back to your plate and take a bite out of your cake.

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You end up staying at the cook’s house overnight after that, at the cook’s urging. You took a pretty vicious beating, after all, and it would take more than three days’ rest and one good meal to get you back up on your feet. The cook tells you about the injuries you sustained: multiple cuts and bruises all across your body, a swollen jaw, broken ribs, and a dislocated knee that you’re glad you weren’t awake to experience being reset to its proper place. According to the cook, the sound hadn’t been pretty. 

(‘So you’re a doctor, too, then?’

A snort. ‘No. I called someone up and had them direct me over the phone on how to fix up your basic injuries. Then I left your ribs to a professional. I didn’t fucking trust myself to handle something as crucial as that.’

‘You have a doctor just on-call like that?’

‘Well, he’s an old friend.’)

You acquiesce to staying, mostly because after eating your eyelids had started drooping, and also because you’ll take any reason to eat another meal made by the cook again. The cook’s house is two storeys high and big enough to easily accommodate another person—it probably could’ve accommodated you ten times over, actually—and the cook insists, at your every protest, than you wouldn’t be a bother at all. And so you stay. You need time to heal, anyway, to regain your strength and get back on your feet; finding your crew can wait. Another night turned to another day, another day to another week, and before long you realise you’ve lived at the cook’s house for nearly a month.

It’s been fun. The cook’s the perfect sort of host, timelessly flawless as he is in his attentive service and genuinely sincere as he is in his happiness from seeing other people happy. The cook treats his own role as a chef as something as natural as an arm, as undeniable and instinctive as breathing. It’s not just an aspect of his life, but the foundation; and that’s apparent in the way he’d introduced himself, you’ve realised—_well, I’m a cook. _A fact more quintessential, to him, than his own name.

You tell him more about yourself than you have told any other hosts you’ve ever stayed with in your life. When you first tell him that you’re a pirate, the cook laughs once, low and deep, and, after exchanging a quick glance and a grin with the old man over his shoulder, only says, _well, maybe it’s fate that I was the one who picked you up when you were unconscious then. _Maybe it is. What are the odds, after all, of a pirate being picked up by another pirate? The cook claims that he’s retired now, but you know that regardless of setbacks or decisions or circumstances, all pirates live with the siren song of the waves shaking in their blood, in a relentless itch that would probably never go away. It’s the life-pulse that people like you live by.

Conversations with the cook always happen in the afternoon, when lunch has been cleared from the dining table and the cook finds the time to spare to sit on the other side, smoking an unholy amount of cigarettes that you’re amazed has not killed him twice over yet—the cook barks out a laugh when you tell him that—and as the sunlight striping in from the kitchen window over the cook’s shoulder steadily turns itself to a golden low. The old man’s frequently there during the conversations. Sometimes he’s awake and contributes a comment or two, but most of the time he’s asleep on the couch and dead to the world; however, at times, you feel like even when the old man’s eyes are shut and he’s lying still and unmoving on the couch, arms folded behind his head on the throw cushions, he’s still awake and listening to every word.

You talk to the cook about everything. Your origins from the South Blue, you and your crew, and you describe and boast about every single one of them. The adventures you’ve had along the first half of the Grand Line, the crazy people you’ve encountered—and then all the narrow escapes your crew have had to accomplish in countries and islands and cities and towns, blood-smeared and dust-blown and laughing all the way. You sketch out the contours of your ship on a napkin with a pen and show it to the cook, and brag about where it’s taken you and when.

Sometimes, when you mention certain places you have been to, the cook will throw in his own comment about the place, tapping long fingers thoughtfully against his chin. _Oh, last time I was there, it was being ruled by some bastard king. Glad to see that things have improved now—_ Or, _I’ve been to that festival! Lots of fun, I got to know some wonderful ladies there who showed us all around the island, I hope they’re still doing well now— _Or, _Christ, is that what’s happened there? It was so peaceful when we had stopped by. _In those last instances, when you tell him about famine or civil war or devastating tragedies, the cook will look unspeakably older than his years, long bangs shadowing his face as he silently stubs out a cigarette into an already-overflowing ashtray.

And that’s the thing. Despite all the laughter, despite all the conversation, there are moments where shadows would cross the cook’s face, trembling like in half-light; times when you mention a date or a year or a particular event in history and it seems as though some vicious thought slips itself unwanted around the confines of the cook’s mind, tightens and holds itself fast there. You wonder if it’s something that you’ve said, or did; but the one time you ask, the cook shakes himself out of his reverie and hastens to reassure you that things are fine, and that it’s not your fault, and that he’s sorry for worrying you and for making you feel bad about it. But in those moments, the lines around the cook’s eyes are always gaunt with something like exhaustion, and his fingers when he lights a cigarette shake. Around you, the bruising shadows from the rising twilight seems to envelop the house in a soft sigh of surrender; and the old man, always, staring across from where the cook is steadfastly avoiding his eyes, with a mouth drawn tight in unhappiness.

There are things that neither the cook nor the old man talks about. But there are things you don’t talk about either. You brag about your crew, and your ship, and about all the adventures you had with them along the Grand Line; but you don’t mention where your crew is or where your ship has gone now, and the cook and the old man don’t ask.

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It’s morning, just after breakfast (poached eggs with a glazed sauce, paired with freshly squeezed grapefruit juice and coffee—the cook manages to outdo himself every single time, you don’t know how he does it), and the cook is gone from the house, having left for the Sabaody marketplace to get fresh ingredients for the day’s meals like he always does. You’re lounging around on the living room couch, kicking your legs in the air and squinting your way through the newspapers (you can read, but not really that well) when the old man comes in through the back door, finished with his morning training and wiping sweat away from his neck with a towel.

The first time you watched him train and witnessed him lifting weights the literal trees, you had been impressed. But mostly, you had been terrified. You almost thought that the old man was playing a prank on you, but when you finally asked, the cook assured you that the old man one hundred percent was not.

‘He trains like this everyday,’ the cook said. ‘Even though he’s pushing seventy and has _absolutely no need to do this—’ _the last part was said with a raised voice thrown in the old man’s direction, who merely lifted one middle finger from his weights without pausing from his reps, ‘—he still keeps on doing it anyway. Years ago he decided that he was going to become strong, and I guess he hasn’t really stopped at that since. Not even now, when he’s retired and old and should really be taking care of his health more, instead of out here straining his body doing strenuous shit like this.’ The cook’s mouth had twisted, then, as though his cigarette had been too bitter.

‘Anyway, he doesn’t know how to play a joke. He’s too stupid for that.’

That last comment had gotten the cook and the old man into a fight, where the cook had showed that he could hold his own quite admirably in battle, and you had retreated into the safety of the house for fear for your own life. Now the old man’s impossible training has become an everyday part of the routine in the household, something that you only dimly register; breakfast ends, the cook goes out shopping, you read, the old man goes out training. Most of the time you don’t even register when he comes back into the house. But this time, however, your senses have been on alert since the old man first stepped outside an hour ago. Now, as he thumps his way up the stairs, presumably going to take a shower, you wonder about finally just asking him.

You started to notice it about one and a half weeks into your stay at the cook’s house. In hindsight, you kind of wonder how you managed to miss it, really. But it is simultaneously also the easiest thing to miss in the world, subtle and understated as it is, the way only something well-worn and long-standing can be. Like an aspect of life so routine it is practically muscle memory, so automatic you don’t even think to mention it. That’s probably why you didn’t catch onto things until you started paying attention; it might not have even occurred to the cook and the old man to announce it. That being said, though, you _really _want to know.

You’re still undecided when the old man comes back down the stairs and goes to the fridge to pull out a bottle of something cold and presumably alcohol-laden; you hear the _clink _of glass, and then the sound of the refrigerator door shutting, and as the old man comes over to the couch to sit at the armchair next to you, you decide, _fuck it, _because you know what, you’re a pirate and a damn good one at that and you didn’t make it this far as a pirate by being stopped by something as dumb as the fear of offending people’s sensibilities.

‘So, like,’ you start, and the old man doesn’t pause in his guzzling but he does look at you, ‘are you and the cook dating?’

You’re not going to be stopped by something as dumb as the fear of offending people’s sensibilities—but you probably could have worded that a bit better, you think, as the old man chokes on his drink and starts sputtering.

‘What makes you think that?’ The old man asks, finally, when he’s regained his breath. His voice is raspy from the choking fit. You feel at least a _little _bad.

‘I mean, it’s the way you two act around each other,’ you point out.

The brushing of a hand along a jaw and shoulder when passing by after dinner to put down dirtied dishes, as though in thanks for the meal. The catching of the cook by the waist when he accidentally slips on the shiny kitchen floor, fingers digging sharply into a hip. The unconscious angling of the cook’s body whenever the old man speaks, in those long afternoon conversations, a head tipping closer as though any distance surmounted (no matter how miniscule) is distance counted. The pressing of shoulders at dinner, when seated side by side, the easy familiarity in which they reach over each other for sauces or glasses, arms sliding along shoulders or winding around the front of torsos. An aspect of life so routine, it’s as instinctive as muscle memory.

‘That’s just because the cook and I have known each other for a long time,’ the old man protests.

You don’t say anything, but you think the expression on your face is response enough. The old man narrows his eyes at you, before taking another belligerently huge swig out of his bottle. This showy display aggression leaves you blatantly unimpressed; but you think over the old man’s words.

The old man’s right, to a certain degree. Deep intimacy and devotion are not exclusive to lovers nor romance, can be born from platonic affection or from years and time or even nurtured from norms and traditions. But there’s something between them that you think is just _different_; you wouldn’t have spoken up and asked otherwise. A feeling without a name, that you can’t put your finger on. You remember once, waking up earlier than usual and padding out of your borrowed room to the restroom—and seeing, through a half-open door, two bodies sleeping in the same bed, the arm slung over the cook’s waist slack and unguarded in the early morning sunlight. The cook’s face had been half-buried into pillows and blankets, so you weren’t able to fully see his expression, but you still believe that had been the most at peace you have ever seen him be. There’s a certain vulnerability there that you would not have guessed at, if not for that one behind-the-doors moment you managed to glimpse through either coincidence or serendipity (you’re not sure which), and it’s that one moment that makes you suspect there being something more between the old man and the cook. But you don’t articulate any of this to the old man; you simply stare at him until he begins looking uncomfortable.

When it’s clear that you’re not going to let up, the old man sighs. ‘Listen, kid,’ he begins. ‘It’s not… quite like that.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘As in,’ the old man pauses, and wow he must really not be used to talking about his feelings like this, you think, if two seconds of conversation makes him look like he’d sooner swallow his own swords, ‘it’s complicated.’

The scoff that leaves your mouth is instinctive. Dear god, have you heard _that _one before.

The old man glares. ‘Shut up and listen. The cook and I have a relationship that’s different from what you think it is—’

‘Is this about the age gap thing, because don’t worry I’m not judgmental—’ Okay, well, you think it’s a _tad _weird. But hey, the world’s a big place.

The old man snorts a little at that, as though there’s an inside joke there that you don’t know about that he finds amusing. ‘No, not that. Look, the cook likes women.’

Alright, that shuts you up. ‘What—? But—’

‘That’s why I said,’ the old man says, sitting back once he’s successfully gotten your attention, ‘it’s complicated.’

‘Okay…’ You trail off, trying hard to make sense of things. You frown. ‘Then what’s with your arrangement right now?’

‘Arrangement?’

You gesture around the house, as if saying _you know, this. _

The old man casts a quick glance around. His mouth goes _o,_ in acknowledgement. ‘The cook owns this house. I was the one who showed up afterwards, and I asked to stay with him. He said yes.’ A quick answer, succinct and neat. The old man takes another huge gulp of his alcohol. He’s nearly done with it now. 

The casual way the old man describes their past leaves you agog. It’s as if he’s commenting on something as natural as the sky, as reasonable as truth. _The sky is blue. The ocean is vast. And I asked to stay with him. _You stare at the old man, who is currently inspecting the bottom of his bottle for any last droplets of alcohol.

‘By the way, kid,’ he adds, ‘do me a favour and don’t mention this conversation we had to the cook. He won’t appreciate it.’

‘...Okay,’ you agree, bewildered but respectful of the old man’s wishes. ‘But if this is the situation, then what precisely are you two?’

The old man shrugs, unconcerned. ‘We’re crewmates and _nakama, _first and foremost. And that’s what matters.’

‘But—’

The look the old man shoots your way indicates that the discussion is over. Sulking, you acquiesce, flopping back into the couch cushions and flipping your way through the newspapers again, labouriously scanning through the lines of small print to look for any information concerning your own crewmates. There’s silence for a few moments. You sneak glances out of the corner of your eye, concerned.

‘Hey—’

The old man pauses at your tone and looks up at you.

‘Are you actually fine with how things are right now?’

The half-smirk the old man shoots your way is the realest thing you have seen from him in all the time you’ve been here. Despite his advancing age, he suddenly looks thirty years younger, boyish with the confidence of someone who has never known what it’s like to not have their dreams within reachable distance. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ is all he says, just as the front door opens and the cook steps through the doorway with his arms laden with shopping bags, ‘Things are good as it is.’

.

.

.

_‘Do you understand what you’re doing?’ He asks. _

_There’s only the slightest rasp to the doctor’s breath, despite the fact that there is an ugly ragged wound in the side of his body, a hole blasted clean through the flesh from when he had been distracted during a fight and had been unable to dodge. The doctor is clutching hard at the wound in an attempt to stem the bleeding, but it’s mostly a fruitless effort; the blood wells up anyway, spilling itself dark and unforgiving onto the floor, and it drains more and more with every passing second. There’s a sickly sheen of sweat beading the doctor’s brow, and his complexion is pale and leeched of colour. Regardless, his eyes are unclouded. He’s being serious. _

_‘Yes,’ you say, and your thoughts are clear. You deliberately avoid acknowledging the gaze you can feel boring into the back of your head and focus on the doctor instead. _

_‘You can do it, right?’ You ask. It’s not that you distrust the doctor’s skills, but from the way it looks as though half his body’s blood seems to have been emptied onto the floor, you doubt if the doctor will be able to stay alive long enough for anything to be completed. _

_The navigator of your ship protests. Her left arm hangs oddly down her side and there’s a limp to her step; none of you have escaped the previous battle unhurt. ‘Surely there’s another way—’ _

_‘There isn’t another way,’ the doctor interrupts, and your navigator falls silent at the look of fatalism on his face._

.

.

.

The very next day, the old man collapses while carrying dishes to the sink after breakfast, and things are not good at all.

You rise out of your chair in a panic, but the cook beats you there by a mile, darting past you fast as quicksilver to reach the old man’s side to prop him up and cradle his head in the crook of his arm. The look in the cook’s eye is wild, frantic, and there’s something in the unbidden rawness of his expression that leaves you freezing right where you stand, helpless and only able to watch as he presses his ear to the old man’s chest, looking for signs of a heartbeat. The old man does not move.

The cook’s blond hair is spilling itself brilliant like golden sunlight over the old man’s scarred-rough brown skin. The rest of the world might as well not exist, right now—the whole world narrowing itself down to this kitchen with the warm-painted walls and linoleum floors, air suspended like a shiver and strung tight as a breath. Wish and fear thudding themselves equally hard against your breastbone, you scarcely dare to breathe, every slip of air you are able to take into your lungs and heart somehow feeling like an egregious offence against the cook and the old man lying motionless on the floor. Just yesterday, the old man had been practicing with weights three times his size. Just yesterday, the old man had opened a bottle of booze and shared a conversation with you. Just yesterday, the old man had seemed healthy and alive. The air you inhale feels fragile in its heavy implications.

But abruptly, like an engine wheezing itself back to life again, the old man hacks out an awful cough, and jerks back to life. You could’ve collapsed on the floor right then and there; as it stands, you stagger and slump back into your seat at the dining table, your legs giving way from the relief that floods through your veins light-headed and dizzying. You guess that the cook probably feels the same way too; but the cook’s hands are already uncurling themselves from around the old man, escaping elusive as smoke to the kitchen window to light up a cigarette and press it, silently, to his lips. On the floor, the old man only curls up again once, before straightening out of sheer grim force of will and heaving to his feet.

You can only watch as the whole thing unfolds itself like a scene in a play. The old man is on his knees in a bitter facsimile of a proposal, struggling to get himself upright, but he only has eyes for the cook, standing stiff and emotionless against the window, face turned away towards the sun and black figure stark and unyielding in the kitchen. The morning sunlight streaming in through the kitchen window suddenly feels too vivid, dreamless and unreal, rendering the old man and the cook’s figures as distant and far away as memory; you feel, instinctively, that somehow this scene in the kitchen will be something that you will remember even years down the road, the smallest things the biggest in their significance, the bright edge of something being struck ringing in your ears.

Still not looking away from the window, the cook says, ‘I’m calling Chopper.’

The lines on the old man’s face seem to harden like bitter defensive armour. ‘I’m fine,’ he says, deliberately, sounding as much as though he is trying to convince himself as he is the cook. 

Something in the cook seems to snap, then, the lines of his back tight as a string as he whirls around to slam a hand on the dining table surface, uncaring at the way you flinch at the sudden movement.

‘Don’t bullshit me, bastard! You know as well as I do that you’re _not.’ _The cook almost shouts the words, his hands shaking as he rips the cigarette away from his teeth and viciously crushes it into the ashtray. The cook pushes past the old man and storms out the kitchen in a black flurry of footsteps.

‘You’ve been sick for the whole year but you fucking _refuse _to do _anything _about it because you’re a fucking _moron_—’

The old man’s voice rises, too, as he turns around and follows the cook out, ‘I _have _been doing something about it—’

‘Working out more and drinking extra amounts of alcohol does _not _amount to doing _something about it_—’

‘It’s worked for me before—’

‘That’s when you were young and stupid, and your one brain cell had interpreted that kind of thing as _medicine, _somehow—’

‘Well if it’s worked then it’ll work now—’

_‘But you’re not young anymore, you stupid fool,’ _the cook shouts, and the world grinds itself to a halt as the words hang themselves black and unforgiving in the air between the two of them. ‘Why can’t you get it through your _thick_ skull that things aren’t the same as before? You aren’t going to fight through this. You can’t fight with—’ the cook snarls, at a loss for words and furious about it, ‘—with _yourself, _with something as inevitable as _dying, _because there’s nothing to fight against! There is _nothing _to _win, _you _bastard, _don’t you know that? I _know_ you know—we saw that countless times when we were sailing as pirates, with countless people in countless cities in countless _places—’_

_‘Enough.’_

The old man’s voice cuts through the air as sharp as a swung blade. The cook falls silent, hands fisting themselves into trouser pockets as he glances to the side. You’re sitting awkwardly in the kitchen, unsure of where to look or what to do with yourself, when you feel a stare; you glance up to see the old man’s eye training itself steadily on you, before looking away.

‘Not in front of others.’ The old man says, quiet.

The cook’s eyes dart to land on you, still sitting at the table and having heard every word, and the dawning look on his face confirms your suspicions that the cook had indeed, in his outburst, all but forgotten than you were here. A look of embarrassment flits across his face, and the cook drops his gaze; but more than embarrassment at his own disservice as a host you could see a hopeless sense of vulnerability, the kind that crumples the cook’s face into the most honest you have ever seen him, young and old at the same time. Grief could be the most curious thing. 

‘…I’m calling Chopper,’ the cook says, finally, before turning around and going up the stairs. The old man doesn’t protest, but simply watches him go; until he disappears, out of sight, into the landing.

.

.

.

Chopper, as it turns out, is a doctor, which is something that you’ve managed to guess correctly based on the previous conversation’s context clues. However, Chopper, as it turns out, is also a talking reindeer, which is something that you are decidedly not prepared for when he first shows up on the cook’s doorstep walking on all fours with knapsacks on either side of his torso. You mistakenly ask the cook if reindeer is what is on the menu tonight, and promptly shriek in surprise over the cook’s loud barks of laughter when said reindeer starts loudly and vehemently protesting in offense against being dubbed the night’s meal. Afterwards, you apologise profusely to Dr. Chopper, and promptly earn the doctor’s forgiveness for your verbal offense, but even in mid-grovel to the doctor you cannot bring yourself to say that you regret what you said; at your comment, the cook had laughed for the first time since the fight between him and the old man a week ago. 

Under Dr. Chopper’s strict supervision and care, the old man is made to sleep more, train less, and is completely banned from alcohol altogether. This last verdict is handed down with no little amount of protests from the old man himself—but Dr. Chopper is firm and unrelenting when it comes to medicine and health in ways that he isn’t in anything else (you once wheedled him into giving you a piggyback ride around the backyard, which had been an enormous amount of fun), and the old man, finding that his arguments are being met with nothing but narrowed eyes and wordless stare-downs, gracelessly acquiesces. Possibly out of his respect to his doctor, who is, if you understand correctly, also an old-time friend and crewmate of his, but also more likely than not out of compromise to the cook, who, during the whole examination, had stood far away from the bed and chain-smoked silently the entire time.

But just because the old man’s agreed to a treatment and rest plan doesn’t mean that he isn’t going to complain about it. Like how he’s doing right now, in bed and surly about it after he was caught secretly training in the backyard. The old man’s pointed grumbles follow you around the room as you help fluff his pillows and pile on more blankets over his bed.

‘This is ridiculous,’ the old man says. ‘I’m not some helpless baby who can’t do anything for_ himself.’_ The cook enters the room then to set down a glass of water and a bottle of pills on the bed-stand, and the old man glares at the pills and glass as though they have personally offended him. ‘I’m not even allowed to get my own water, what kind of stupidity is _that?’ _

‘You’re not allowed to get your own water not because we think you can’t walk down some damn stairs, but because we all know that if you had it your way you would wash down your medicine with alcohol,’ the cook snaps. ‘Now stop whining like an actual baby and eat this shit—Chopper said a dose every six hours.’

The look the old man shoots the cook would quail a lesser man. However, as the cook is decidedly not a lesser man, all he does is raise an unimpressed eyebrow in reply and flick his gaze down to the water and pills, and back up again, in silent command.

The old man gives in. ‘Alcohol would’ve done the same job,’ he says, sulkily, before tossing the pills into his mouth and reaching for the water glass.

‘They’re not the same damn thing and you know it.’

The cook keeps a critical eye on the old man until he drains the whole glass; nods to himself in satisfaction when the glass is empty, and whisks away the dish and cup the instant the old man sets them down. The old man scowls.

The cook notices. ‘Quit that,’ he says, none-to-gently hitting the old man upside the head, before pushing him down under the covers. ‘Get some rest now, you hear? I’ll call you up once dinner is ready—and so help me god if either Chopper or I find you out of bed and training again we _will _knock you out and tie you to this bed, don’t think we won’t.’

With that last threat, the cook turns on his heels, and walks out of the bedroom. You scurry after him, pausing at the door to look back over your shoulder at the old man, just in time to see him grudgingly settle down and close his eyes.

Downstairs, Dr. Chopper is seated at the dining table drinking a cup of tea (herbal, his own personal blend for energy and rejuvenation). Despite looking like he’s barely past his thirties (or at least as much as he can look a human age as a reindeer-human hybrid), Dr. Chopper once told you that he’s actually over sixty years old. On principle, you choose not to believe him. You especially can’t believe him, you think, in moments like this, when his face lights up young and boyish upon spotting you and the cook descending from the stairs. You slide into the chair opposite him.

‘The bastard’s gone to bed,’ the cook says, before Dr. Chopper has the chance to open his mouth and speak, ‘though I make no promises about whether he’ll actually stay there.’

Dr. Chopper looks suitably vexed, but there’s something about the expression on his furry face that makes you think that he’s unsurprised by that answer. ‘He’s never listened to doctor’s orders, even back when we were sailing together on Sunny,’ he sighs. 

You lean forward from your seat, eager to hear more. ‘Sunny? Is that the name of your ship?’ You ask. Behind you, the cook pauses briefly in his hurrying around the kitchen in preparation for dinner; his footsteps click to a stop for only a short moment before continuing their way to the refrigerator.

Across from you, Dr. Chopper beams at the opportunity to talk about his past as a pirate, oblivious to the cook’s reaction at the question. ‘Yeah! One of them, actually.’

‘You guys sailed on more than one ship?’

Dr. Chopper nods in confirmation. ‘We had another ship before Sunny. A smaller one, back when we were a smaller crew.’

‘You were a small crew? How small?’ Hm, small crews are quite unusual. On seas as vicious as the Grand Line and as merciless as the New World, manpower is usually quite essential for survival. 

‘Before I joined, it had just been five people! One of them was actually—’

‘Chopper,’ comes the cook’s voice from the side, interrupting the conversation, ‘where in god’s name did you put my strainer?’

Dr. Chopper tips his head to the side in confusion. ‘I left it right there, in the sink. Do you not see it?’

‘No, I don’t. Where precisely did you put it?’

As Dr. Chopper slides off his seat and walks over to where the cook is working at the sink in order to help him look for the strainer, you frown at the cook’s back.

You’re no fool. The strainer is obviously a made-up excuse used by the cook to stop Dr. Chopper from talking to you any more about their time together as pirates; you can literally spot the strainer from where you are seated right now, strategically placed at an angle in the sink so that Dr. Chopper, from his point of perspective, is unable to see it. The thing that you don’t understand though, is why the cook would do such a thing. In all the time you’ve been here, the cook and the old man have been fairly open with the fact that they used to be pirates, and have even shared anecdotes and details about islands they’ve visited in the past or adventures that they had. _Oh, yeah, there was this island with a bunch of really long animals, it was hilarious, you really should have seen it. Oh, the Shichibukai? Psh, once you see the New World you’ll realise that they aren’t really a big deal after all. _But yet, ever since Dr. Chopper’s arrived they’ve started becoming persistently secretive about the details of their past, as if they now have something to lose. This sudden turnaround in behaviour leaves you very confused. You don’t understand what in their past the cook and old man could be so adamant about hiding from you; you’re a pirate yourself, lawlessness isn’t exactly something you’re going to judge them for. You’ve often thought about confronting the cook about this behaviour, but yet every time you think to broach the subject, you can’t seem to bring yourself to; not with the cook looking the way he does, with tension tight and high-strung across his shoulders and with how he looks as though he hasn’t slept well since the old man first collapsed those many weeks ago.

And the cook still looks like that now, unrelaxed even with a doctor’s constant supervision and expert advice on the old man’s situation and condition. Tension is still present in the lines of the cook’s back. His head is tipped to the side, and he and Dr. Chopper are quietly conferring at the sink over something (presumably details about the old man’s condition, since Dr. Chopper has a furrow in his brow). You glance at the ashtray on the dining table. It’s overflowing with cigarette butts and thick greying ash, spilling from the edges and scattering themselves like wisps of clouds across the table top.

‘Dr. Chopper,’ you call out.

The cook stiffens even more, if possible, as Dr. Chopper turns back around. You flick your eyes between the doctor and the cook, who seems to have forcibly relaxed himself and is back to preparing for tonight's dinner, pouring some sort of broth through the strainer into a stewing pot below. The little reindeer doctor walks back over to the table.

‘What is it?’ The doctor asks, looking at you with wide brown eyes.

And you can’t bring yourself to do it, asking more about their times as pirates, not with the cook looking the way he does with tension tight and high-strung across his shoulders and with how he looks as though he hasn’t slept well since the old man first collapsed those many weeks ago; you may be a pirate used to taking what you want but you have never wanted to be needlessly cruel, and so you give up and change the topic instead.

‘How’s the old man doing?’ You ask.

You ask the question without really much thought to the response. You expect a pacifying answer, one filled with terminology and jargon that you wouldn’t understand but you would be able to roughly translate into the idea that _‘it’s quite serious, but it’s nothing that cannot be fixed’. _The cook had told you, when Dr. Chopper had first came to stay, that the reindeer was actually one of the best doctors in the world, capable of curing any disease or any ailment any human had, and with a moniker like that, the rock that’s been sitting in your chest over the old man’s condition had eased itself rapidly, undoing the knot of anxiety in your throat. 

But against your expectations, Dr. Chopper’s face creases at your question. ‘I’m doing everything that I can to treat his symptoms,’ he says, slipping back into his seat and frowning down into his tea, ‘but at this point there’s only so much I can do. This isn’t an illness I can treat or some fatal disease I can cut out; it’s not actually something that is curable.’

You still.

‘What do you mean?’ You ask urgently, leaning forward towards the doctor.

Dr. Chopper looks surprised at the intensity of your question. You wonder briefly at the back of your head at yourself, as well; you didn’t think you would grow to care for the peculiar couple (or not-couple, according to the old man) living here as much as you have come to have, even if they _had_ picked you up off the streets half-dead and nursed you back to life. But bonds can be an enigmatic thing, and you’ve never been one to think too much about anything whether for better or for worse, and so you shake off that thought for now and focus on the current situation at hand.

‘Well,’ the doctor says slowly, ‘the reason why he isn’t as strong as he used to be is because his heart is getting weaker. If it were working improperly because of some disease I would have the medicine or the surgical skills necessary to fix it, but for the most part the reason behind its failure is just—’ Dr. Chopper pauses, helpless.

‘—Is just old age. He’s dying because he’s old. That isn’t a disease. I can’t do anything about that.’ 

You’re at a loss for words. Dr. Chopper looks so young, swirling the tea in his cup as though he wishes he could somehow divine some kind of miraculous solution from within its small, small world. At once you understand the cook’s outburst from before, understand the pain deep-set into the cook’s figure like something inevitable and imminent, because now you know that the cook has known. The cook has always known. Yet he and the old man have tried to fight against it anyway, calling Dr. Chopper and cutting down on unhealthy ingredients in desserts and also everything they have done before that too, you realise—carving out a space for themselves on this island on the cusp between the old and new, bickering over the little things and cultivating little household habits and sleeping together in the same bed as though they believed they were going to live like this forever. Rapidly, your eyes flicker from the doctor to the cook, who has been silent during this entire exchange; you see his hands, stirring the slow-burning stew in the pot, tremble as though he’s afraid and angry both at once, powerless against how the world is too small. Grief could be the most curious thing.

‘How long does he have?’ You ask, finally, quietly.

Dr. Chopper’s hooves on the table top flex and unflex. ‘Anything from a few years to a few weeks. It’s hard to say.’

Outside, the setting sun stripes the kitchen in black and orange-gold, silhouetting everyone in the room in half light and half shadow.

.

.

.

_‘There isn’t another way,’ the doctor interrupts, and your navigator falls silent at the look of fatalism on his face. ‘I’ve been thinking and trying to come up with something, anything else, but—’ His jaw clenches as he glances to the side. _

_The air hangs grey as smoke over you and the crew, quiet despite the sounds of distant fighting occurring outside. You, along with everybody else, are in hiding, regrouping to strategise on your next moves and to heal any wounds before going outside again. The seconds tick away, infinitely precious; it’s only a matter a time before your enemies find where you are. You ignore the screaming pain in your own ribs, most probably broken from your own fights earlier. They don’t matter. Not in the face of this. _

_‘I’ll do it,’ you say again, testing the words in your mouth to see if you regret saying them. You find that you still don’t, which only further strengthens your resolve. Maybe you will, in the future, once the consequences set in, but well, you’re a pirate. Living in the moment is what you do best. _

_‘If it’s the only chance we have to succeed, we can’t _not _take it.’ You cast your gaze around the room, meeting everyone’s eyes but one. ‘We’ve come so far, we can’t give up now.’ For a multitude of reasons. ‘So I’ll do it. But—'_

_You look at the doctor again. ‘Are you aware about _you’re _offering?’ You ask, serious. The stakes are much higher for him than they are for you, you think, and the consequences would be a lot more immediate for him than it will be for you. It’s a lot he’s offering to give up, the doctor; a lot more than you, considering his position, even if you know there_ is_ a reason behind it. _

_The doctor manages a smirk. ‘I wouldn’t have said it in the first place if I wasn’t ready to do it. And besides—’ His eyes flick down, to where his wound is oozing blood all over the floor, and you understand. _

_There’s no time left to think. No time to philosophise, to consider the deeper and far-reaching implications of the actions, to wonder about the _what-if_s or the _maybe-_s. There’s only time for action, right now, like pulling the trigger on a gun, like the immediate shot of a bullet to its target. Immediate and swift. Timing is the key. _

_‘Fine.’ You nod and do not question the doctor’s resolve, in respect to the way he did not question yours. _

_The doctor nods back once, curtly. ‘Are you ready?’ He asks. _

_‘Yes.’ _

_‘Then let’s begin.’_

.

.

.

Later on that day, when dinner has been eaten and gotten over with and everybody has washed up to go to sleep for the night, you walk past the old man’s room and see the cook sitting by the bedside, hands clasped together and eye cast downwards to avoid looking the old man in the eye. The old man is awake. His gaze is fixed on the cook as though there is nothing else to focus on in the world; you hide behind the door frame, anyway, peeking around the corner to watch the two of them.

The cook speaks to the floor.

‘You’re going to die sooner rather than later. We can’t just keep pretending it isn’t going to happen.’

The old man regards the cook for a moment. ‘I’m not afraid. Are you?’

The cook laughs once, and it’s a choked sound. ‘Of course you’re not. Stupid bastard.’

‘Do you regret it?’

‘Regret what?’

‘This.’ The old man gestures to the cook’s entire person, as though that would help explain anything at all. But the cook seems to get it, because he shakes his head.

‘No.’ The answer comes immediately, and with no hesitation. ‘It was our duty to our captain; it had to be done.’

‘Even at the expense of yourself.’ The old man’s voice is quiet.

‘Even at the expense of myself.’

This conversation makes absolutely no sense to you. You don’t know what they’re talking about—what about the cook, and what about their captain? Could this be the reason why they have been so secretive about their past as pirates, you wonder. Before you could contemplate any further, however, the old man brings a hand up to the cook’s face.

The cook lifts his eyes. Your eyes fixate on how the old man’s hand, wrinkled and spotted-brown with age, contrasts against the cook’s young fair cheek. There is something incongruous in that difference, somehow. A silent conversation passes between the two of them in that moment. 

‘And you?’ The cook’s voice is low, his gaze searching the old man’s face as though seeking something that he thinks should be there, something that should mirror the expression on his own face but finding nothing. You think it looks a little bit like borrowed regret. The cook searching and seeing, the old man content to be seen. ‘Do you regret—this?’

The cook brings up his own hand to curl, almost hesitantly, around the old man’s—the action, though readily given, is strangely distant, as though it had been done for the old man’s sake more than anything else. And yet the old man smiles as though it is enough.

‘No.’ The old man says. ‘I don’t need any more than this.’ 

‘But you could’ve _wanted—’_

‘I don’t _want_ any more than this, cook.’ The old man turns his hand around, and captures the cook’s with his own; brings it up to his mouth, and closes his eyes briefly. ‘I’m happy with what I have—with what _we _have, right now.’

‘How?’ The cook asks, stricken.

The old man pauses.

‘I don’t want anything more than what you are willing to give.’ He says. _I don’t want anything more from anyone, unless it’s you. _

The look on the cook’s face is part heartbreak and part tenderness. It’s the closest thing to love you’ve seen on him, but even so, it isn’t the same. It isn’t the same.

‘You’re an idiot,’ is all the cook says in response, as he carefully pulls his hand from the old man’s grip and stands up. The old man doesn’t protest, letting the cook go without a word and watching as the cook starts for the door. ‘Go to sleep first, I’m going down to the kitchen to do some prep work for tomorrow’s breakfast. I’ll be here to wake you up in the morning.’

The old man smirks. ‘I know you’ll be.’

Darting your eyes around frantically, you find nowhere to hide and end up pressing yourself flat against the wall of the landing as the cook steps out of the old man’s room, which actually does nothing for you in hiding the fact that you secretly have been eavesdropping and watching the entire time. However, the cook doesn’t say anything when he passes by you while heading towards the stairs; the cook doesn’t even acknowledge you, actually, walking past without a word to disappear, out of sight, downstairs. You stare after him, bewildered.

The old man’s voice comes from the bedroom. ‘Come in here, kid, I know you’re out there.’

Guiltily, like a child being caught doing something they know they shouldn’t have, you slip into the bedroom and stand against the wall next to the door, shuffling from one foot to another. There’s silence for a while. 

‘Sorry for eavesdropping,’ you offer, as way of conversation starter. You think of saying _I didn’t mean to, _but well, that would be lying.

The old man waves your apology away. ‘It’s fine.’

The old man glances at you for a moment, before looking out of the window. Outside, the sky is dark and spangled with stars.

‘Now you know, kid.’ The old man says, after a pause. ‘The relationship between me and the cook.’

You nod dumbly. ‘How long?’ You ask.

The old man snorts. ‘Depends what you’re asking. How long we’ve lived together like this? About thirty years or so. How long I’ve l— felt this way about him?’

The old man looks away.

‘Even longer than that.’

The sheer number of the years stun you. They unfold in front of your eyes, countless in their meaning—you can’t even begin to imagine the depth to the loyalty and love found in the old man sitting in front of you, the old man with the stern mouth and the scarred eye and the long life that he has spent towards being a swordsman and a pirate to a captain that both he and the cook seem single-mindedly devoted to, and to the cook who he has just now admitted to having loved for longer than you have been alive. In spite of it all, in spite of the challenges and the near hopelessness of his love, still he has persisted. _Don’t worry about it, things are good as it is. _More than anything, the sheer grit of his tenacity confuses you.

‘How have you hung on for so long?’ You find yourself asking, your voice feeling like it’s outside of yourself. ‘Despite everything, how have you—?’

The look the old man gives you is uncomfortably knowing. You avert your eyes, and carefully do not think about the lack of news about your crewmates in the papers, day after day after crushing day. 

‘Because there’s actually nothing to lose.’ The old man’s voice is steady, strong and sure. ‘Because even if there are obstacles, and even if they have knocked you down, so long as you are alive, it means that you haven’t lost at all.’ 

.

.

.

When you spy Galen in the crowd at the marketplace while out shopping with the cook for dinner ingredients a few days later, your first instinct is to run away.

‘Hey, what the—’ The cook looks startled when you abruptly turn around and bolt in the opposite direction from where you two have come from, items in the shopping bags in your hands spilling over in your haste to get away. The cook deftly catches an apple that’s tumbled from your groceries with the crook between his ankle and foot before it hits the ground, and kicks it up so that it lands neatly into the towering pile of produce in his own overflowing shopping bag. He catches you by the collar of your shirt, and his grip is strong as iron and impossible to escape from. ‘What’s wrong?

_‘Nothing,’ _you hiss, your eyes darting to where you can still see Galen, standing at a stall selling fish and haggling with the stall owner over price. He looks well, you note absently, your captain instincts taking over and making you appraise him from head to toe—from where you are you can see that whatever injuries he had sustained from before have mostly healed themselves, his face clean and unbruised, his mouth parting as he argues to reveal a set of mostly intact teeth. (You say mostly, because he seems to be missing one from what you can tell.) His hands, despite having been devastatingly broken and trampled on from the fight previously, seem to have for the most part healed completely unaffected, flexing and unflexing with ease as he fiddles with the money pouch he always keeps on his left hip to count out some coins and hand them over to the fish stall-owner. He looks well, and you’re glad for it. Galen is a born healer; his hands have been made to soothe hurts and reassure nightmares and bandage wounds, and so you’re glad that _his_ hands, at the very least, have been spared from any permanent damage. 

At least, any permanent damage that you can see. You clench your fists, feeling white-hot shame course through you at the sight of your own crewmate standing in front of you; he’s alive, and he’s well, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t suffered. And you as the captain had done nothing about it.

The cook follows your line of sight, and his gaze flickers between you and Galen, still standing at the fish stall watching the fish he purchased get wrapped up by the stall-owner. A flash of understanding goes through the cook’s eyes. ‘Ah.’

Galen accepts the parcel of fish with a smile; tucks it under his arms, turns in your direction.

_‘Shit,’ _you say, and all but bodily drag the cook away from the marketplace.

.

.

.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ The cook asks, seated across from you in the living room on the couch just after lunch, a rare moment of relaxation for him when he’s usually busy cooking up a storm in the kitchen. It’s just you and him, right now; Dr. Chopper has recently taken to making weekly trips around the grove in case of any sick people in need of his aid, and the old man has already gone upstairs after eating lunch and dutifully taking his medicine and is currently snoring away. You watch as the cook draws out a cigarette packet from his suit jacket pocket, extracting one with long fingers and lighting it up with a quick flick of a wrist and a lighter. The movement is practiced, as though he has done it a million times in his life before and will do so for a million more; tilting his head back, the cook exhales smoke rings.

In response, you burrow deeper into the couch that you have sunken into, burying your face into a couch cushion, and grunt in neither affirmation nor denial.

The cook quirks his eyebrow. You’ve gotten used to the swirliness of them, now that you have been living here for over two months now. ‘I’m going to need more than that from you, I hope you know.’

You grunt again.

‘Oi.’

You pop your head up from the cushion. ‘I don’t _know,’_ you say, despairing. ‘What is there to—is there even anything to talk about?’

‘Sure there is,’ the cook says easily, waving his cigarette around and scattering grey ash everywhere. You eye that resentfully; over the past weeks you’ve taken to doing chores around the house to make up for the fact that you’ve been essentially living off the old man and cook’s charity, and though you know you’re doing it as a form of repayment, right now you’re feeling sulky and thus not too magnanimous and so all you can think about is how you’re going to have to fucking clean the couches all over again. ‘For one thing, why the fuck are you ignoring your crewmates even though you have done nothing but look for information on them in the papers in the two months you’ve been here?’

You glare. ‘It’s _complicated, _okay.’

You don’t even know where to begin to collect and organise your thoughts into something coherent and understandable and dispassionately deliberated, something more than just a muddy mess of feelings and fleeting thoughts that you have tried, for the past two months, to bury deep within yourself and not face head-on. You’ve never been one to think too much about anything, whether for better or for worse, and normally this particular trait of yours can come in useful in situations, but in your current circumstances it has been nothing but a hindrance.

The cook looks distinctly unimpressed. ‘Try me.’ 

You sigh and sit up, pushing the couch cushions aside to lean forward and rest your weight against your thighs. ‘I mean, of course I’m happy to see them again,’ you try, and you’re reassured to find that it’s not a lie.

The cook says nothing, and waits for you to continue.

‘I’m _definitely _happy to see them again,’ you repeat, ‘but, it’s just that—the last time I saw them, we were—’

A cold metal-knuckled fist swinging your way, knocking you flat out cold right after those same merciless hands had beaten and bashed you straight into the ground, besting you and overwhelming you in strength, confidence, cruelty. Cruelty, because those hands may had battered you into passing out but they did it only after you stayed conscious long enough to witness your crewmates defeated and decimated as easily as pinching out an insect; you can still remember how Galen’s face had been twisted and swollen to something grotesque and unrecognisable, how his eyes had rolled themselves to the back of his head because the pain became too great to bear while awake. All your other crewmates had been the same. You had arrived on the Sabaody Archipelago with ship gun-cannons blazing and with hope and confidence for the future brimming in your chest and soul, but now you’re here two months later defeated and at a loss about what to do. 

‘So what?’ The cook shrugs one careless shoulder. You would call this apathy, except that you know the cook better than that. ‘You’re on the Sabaody Archipelago, where only the strongest of the Grand Line gather. It’s not surprising if you end up meeting another pirate crew much stronger than yours. It’s how the pirate life works. You fight, and you either win or you lose. In this case, you lost.’

‘It’s not about the fact that we lost,’ you snap.

‘Oh? Then what is it?’

‘It’s the fact that I couldn’t help my crew with _anything!’ _Your voice rises at the last word, and you clench your fists so hard that the skin over your knuckles show themselves white and bloodless as bone. ‘I was the fucking _captain, _I was supposed to be able to protect my _crew, _and _yet—’_

And yet you had been helpless to do _anything. _What kind of a pirate captain are you, if you can’t even begin to protect your crew, protect even yourself? At the very least, you think, you should’ve given up your life in exchange for your crewmates’ safety—and yet you’re still here, breathing and alive and _lucky_ to be alive, lucky to be picked off the streets by the cook who only just happened to be in the right place at the right time while possessing the right sort of bleeding heart, meanwhile your crewmates could’ve be anywhere dead or dying or something close to it, maybe, god, you don’t even _know. _You don’t _know _where your crewmates are, right now, you hadn’t even known how to look for them while you had been bedridden and recuperating from your injuries and you hadn’t known how to look for them even after that, stuck staring at newspapers for any sign of their movements while at the same time being intimidated to the point of paralysing fear at the thought of going outside and running into that other pirate crew again. You only just recently plucked up the courage to go outside to do grocery shopping with the cook, and even then it’s still only when you’re with someone else and not alone, never alone, you still don’t know how to face going outside of this little double-storeyed house alone, fuck, aren’t you just the biggest coward? Before Sabaody you had thought yourself one of the bravest pirates there is, but now you realise that cockiness isn’t the same as courage. How could you ever think of facing your crewmates again? How could you even think to call yourself a pirate?

A hand reaches out to cover your own. Your head jerks up, startled, but it’s only the cook, looking down with a pensive look on his face. He gently unfurls your hand from its fist.

‘You shouldn’t be blaming yourself for everything,’ he says, quietly. The cook’s brows are furrowed, and though he’s speaking to you, his eyes seem to be fixed not on you, here, in the present, but instead on some faraway point in the distant past. ‘Not everything is your fault, or your responsibility.’

You stare at him, too incredulous and too bitter to be polite. ‘I’m the captain.’ You repeat. ‘How is everybody’s safety not my responsibility?’

‘You may be the captain, but you’re still just one person,’ the cook says. ‘You have a crew of what, twenty-five, right? That’s a lot of people for one person to be wholly responsible for.’ He chuckles humourlessly. ‘Even ten people would be too much for one person to be wholly responsible for.’ 

That’s an oddly specific number that the cook cites, but you ignore that in favour of pulling your hand away and curling into yourself on the side. You understand what the cook is saying but you’re unable to forgive yourself for anything anyway.

‘Even so, I should’ve have been better than what I was back then.’ You speak into the upholstery of the couch instead of directly at the cook, unable to look another fellow pirate in the eye. ‘Maybe it would have been impossible to save everyone. But I should have at least been able to save _someone.’ _

‘Bullshit.’

You lift your head up. ‘What?’ You ask, bewildered and slightly stung.

The cook is drawing on his cigarette. The lit end glows relentlessly red despite the bright mid-afternoon sun. ‘You heard me,’ he drawls. Smoke escapes in a heady cloud from his mouth as he speaks; with the tendrils of smoke curling around and obscuring his face like a veil, you suddenly feel as though it’s hard to see him clearly.

‘…I don’t understand,’ you say, slowly. 

‘Listen. The world is goddamn _huge_. There are things out there that you have never even seen, things that you wouldn’t have even _dreamed _about seeing, because they’re so fucking outlandish. From all my years as a pirate, one thing I’ve come to learn is that the only constant thing about life—’ The cook waves a hand around, ‘—is change. Never assume that what the world is, is what you have seen of the world.’

The cook leans forward, and the grey smokescreen around him dispels itself from the movement as sunlight might break through thin cloud. ‘So, don’t you think it’s quite arrogant of you to assume that you would be able to effortlessly handle any and every obstacle that comes your way?’ The cook quirks an eyebrow.

‘Wha—I’m strong!’ You say, affronted.

‘I’m sure you are,’ the cook agrees, and the tone of his voice completely sincere, ‘but the point is, is that there’s always going to be someone who is _stronger_. What counts is how you stand up and fight against the ones who are stronger than you, even if you’ve been beaten by them before.’

You frown. ‘But if they’ve beaten me, doesn’t that mean I’ve lost?’

‘No, it doesn’t. You don’t lose until you’re dead. That’s how life works. Countless do-overs, until you don’t. And you’re alive right now, aren’t you? Which means you haven’t lost yet.’

_Because even if there are obstacles, and even if they have knocked you down, so long as you are alive, it means that you haven’t lost at all. _

The cook’s hair is brilliantly golden and streaked to gleaming in the sun. When he grins at you, you see the old man’s figure, pressed and stamped against the lines of the cook’s silhouette; when the cook tilts his head, you see the cut of the old man’s jaw, and the lopsided curve of a smile is duplicated twice over. You resist the urge to reach up and rub at your eyes. You _know _the old man is upstairs sleeping in bed, frequently drowsy as he is now with the medication Dr. Chopper has prescribed to him, but yet somehow it’s almost as if he’s in the room right now with the both of you. An after-mirage, intangible but no less real. It’s unnerving. But comforting, at the same time.

‘So?’ The cook asks. ‘What are going to do?’

The mirage disappears. You breathe in deeply, and then breathe out a lungful of air that feels like the deepest and most cleansing thing you have done in weeks. You grin right back.

‘Oh, shut up,’ you say, with no real spite. ‘“From all my years as a pirate”? You’re not even that much older than me.’

The cook laughs outright at that. ‘Maybe,’ he allows, smirking as though there’s something very ironically funny in the conversation, ‘but my experience on the seas have definitely been much longer than yours have been, so I think it’s safe to say that I’m qualified to give you advice when it comes to these things.’

You acquiesce to that with good (though grudging) grace. The cook starts to stand up.

‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll have to start on dinner preparations now—’ 

‘Wait,’ you interrupt.

The cook pauses. ‘Yes?’

You gesture towards the couch in front of you, where the cook was sitting prior. ‘I have something I want to talk to you about.’

The look on the cook’s face is quizzical, but he obediently sits back down anyway, pulling another cigarette out from his pocket and lighting that one with the same practiced ease as he did with the last one.

You hesitate only briefly. The conversation topic you have in mind will probably be in no way a pleasant one for the cook, but you think that it is necessary. There are things that the cook isn’t talking about, things that he has grown increasingly tight-lipped about ever since the old man collapsed and was confined to bed-rest, and you have seen enough of this kind of behaviour to know that the path that the cook is going down now would be his ending in the future. Plausible deniability, outright denial, suppression of the truth and tilting one’s head away from the shadows to stare so hard into the sun that one eventually ends up blind. It’s a form of coping as old as the hills and the sky, but one that has never ended well for those who have chosen to use it. And you care too much about the cook to want to see him end up the same as those you have seen before him.

‘What are you planning to do after the old man dies?’ You ask, voice soft, and though you regret the way the question makes the cook’s shoulders hike up high and defensive in his suit, you do not apologise.

Perhaps you’re being presumptuous. You’re young after all, or at least, you’re young compared to the age and experience of the old man and cook whom you’ve been living with and have grown to love fiercely like the parents you never had, and so maybe you have no idea what you’re talking about and maybe this will end in nothing but an acidic argument over a misunderstanding that ruins the relationship you have with the cook indefinitely, but you would rather the assurance of the cook’s emotional stability for the price of a few heated words, than the illusion of peace in exchange for what looks to be the cook’s deteriorating stability. You’re a pirate and you didn’t make it this far as one by being stopped by the fear of offending people’s sensibilities, but though you have never wanted to be needlessly cruel there sometimes comes a need for cruelty. Some conversations are difficult precisely because they can be unforgiving. Like having to pop a dislocated limb back into place, the sound unpleasant and unpretty.

The cook isn’t looking at you. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

The cook isn’t looking at you but you hope that he can still feel the sheer _bullshit, don’t lie to me _look you’re levelling at him right now. From the way he fidgets, you guess he probably can; he’s fiddling with the cigarette between his fingers as though he’s seriously contemplating swallowing it to escape the conversation. God, he and the old man are actually so much alike.

‘I think you and I both know that you’re lying right now,’ you reply, and you watch as the cook brings the cigarette up to his lips and drags on it deeply. ‘You need to talk about this, you know.’ 

‘There isn’t anything to talk about.’

‘Sure, there isn’t,’ you agree. ‘The same way how there’s no way you’ve been secretly packing away the things in this house and then unpacking them again when you think everybody is asleep at night.’

When the cook whips his head around to stare at you, shocked, you merely fold your arms and stare back, unimpressed.

‘How do you know about that?’ The cook asks.

You shrug. ‘I started to notice, after a while.’

The cook probably thought that he was being subtle, that he was being secretive, because every time he did this he always made sure to put things back in the proper places with even the exact angle just so; and for the most part you _hadn’t _noticed it, except for the one time you did. Waking up at night to the sound of a muted thump and then a soft curse, walking downstairs to see the cook in the kitchen looking for all the world as though he was simply doing some early meal preparation, except for the fact that there had been books and things strewn across the living room surfaces, too deliberately casual to be undesigned. Once you saw it, it became hard to _not _see it, small clues hidden in plain sight everywhere in the house; a half-finished book, left on the windowsill next to an open window on a breezy night, the pages unruffled and exactly where they were left on the day before. 

The cook doesn’t speak for a while.

‘…Are you the only one to know?’ He asks, at last.

_Does the old man know, _is what he means. Of course it would be that, instead of his own wild fluctuations of denial or his personal demons driving him to haunting indecision at night, it would be the possibility that the old man would find out about all of this that leaves the cook most afraid. The truth of the matter may be that the cook and the old man aren’t in love with each other, but deep intimacy and devotion has never been exclusive to lovers nor romance. And there is devotion to be found, here. Profound and vast, relentless as the deep wells of the sea, you watch how the cook’s fingers shake while waiting for your answer, and so you gentle your voice, and you do not flinch when he glances at you from the corner of his eye. This is the only kindness you can provide.

‘Probably not,’ you answer, and your honesty is a double-edged knife to give, ‘I think the old man’s already noticed for himself.’ 

The cook laughs once, and it’s a short, sharp sound of bitter self-mockery and upset. Your chest aches for it. ‘Of course he has, the fucking bastard,’ the cook mutters, and he leans forward to crush his cigarette into the ashtray on the living room table. ‘Useless for a lot of other shit, but when it comes to these kinds of things, he’s always so _stupidly _observant.’

The old man hasn’t said anything, of course. But he gazes at the cook’s back a little longer, nowadays, especially on nights when the cook excuses himself ostensibly to go downstairs in order to “do some prep work for tomorrow’s breakfast”; and you remember that night, when you first witnessed the self-destructive aftermath of the cook’s indecision, heading back to your room and looking into the open door of the cook and the old man’s bedroom and seeing, seeing, the old man wide awake and staring straight forward in resignation and hard-mouthed regret. There isn’t a solution to give. That is what makes this a tragedy.

‘What are you going to do?’ You ask, again.

‘You can’t keep pretending that this isn’t going to happen; you can’t run away forever. If you don’t want to make any real plans now, fine, but you have to at least face reality head-on instead of constantly looking away. If you don’t,’ and here you pause, before resolutely continuing onwards, ‘it’s only going to hurt all the more when it actually happens.’

Your honesty, a double-edged knife to give. The cook flinches at your last words, before scrubbing at his head, messing up his hair so much that it sticks up at the back in an ungainly fashion. It’s such a far cry from the normally unruffled demeanour that he tries to constantly portray, that it only serves to remind you about how resolutely _real _everything actually is. You have the sudden urge to burst into tears; you don’t do it, for the sake of you both.

‘I _know, _okay?’ The cook says, finally, his voice worn thin and rattled to an old thread of string, seconds away from snapping, ‘I _know _that the stupid bastard is going to die, and I _know _that there isn’t anything that can be done about it, not really—Chopper can work miracles but he can’t do anything like preventing _death_—and I _know, _I _know _that instead of doing something as useless as staying up all night packing and unpacking our things I should be doing something more worthwhile like actually thinking about what I’m going to do once everything here is over, but I don’t know what’s going to happen and I _don’t _want to think about what has to happen next because it means actually admitting that it’s _real, _and—!’ 

The cook slams his fists down on the table in front of you, and the sound cracks in the air like something ugly, impossible to take back. The cook starts, then stares at his own hands in bewilderment as though he couldn’t believe that he just did that. The moment hangs dead still in the air as a noose; and then the cook sags, and bows his head.

‘…He’s _dying,’ _he says, at last, in a voice too small and too tired to possibly be ignored, ‘he’s dying, and I’m being left behind.’

Pirates aren’t scared of death, not really. It’s expected, in your line of business; you’ve spilled plenty of blood yourself, sometimes your own but mostly others, and you have watched bodies drop into water or onto the ground or even into shallow graves, if there had been any mercy left to give. You’ve seen your own men die, and grieved, and you’ve seen your enemies fall, and rejoiced—death is an everyday part of a pirate’s life, no less respected despite its absoluteness and inevitability, and you think that the cook as a former pirate would know that. So the cook is not afraid of death. But he is afraid of being alive. After all, the dead are dead; they cannot mourn, or celebrate their own passing. That is the burden of the people left alive to bear.

You look at the cook for a moment.

‘He’s not going to leave,’ you say, and the cook laughs tiredly at that worn-out platitude of a reassurance. You scowl.

‘He’s not going to leave,’ you repeat, firmly, and the cook finally looks up, perplexed, ‘because he’s going to live on, as a part of you.’

The cook shakes his head.

‘That’s not what I meant. And besides, what even is the use of that?’ The cook says, bitter. ‘I can change my thinking all I want but he’s still going to _stay _dead.'

You frown. ‘It’s precisely _because_ he is going to stay dead, that you should try to change,’ you disagree.

When the cook looks at you, it’s in open-mouthed surprise. The cigarette burns forgotten between his fingers. You grin victoriously.

‘The fact that people we love are going to die is never going to change,’ you say_. _‘It’s inevitable. It’s always going to happen, no matter how much we wish otherwise. That’s why we should keep the memory of the people we love the most closest to us, for as long as we can remember, for as long as we live. People won’t die until their loved ones’ memories of them fade away. So you should keep the old man alive with you by remembering him.

‘You don’t _lose,’_ you finish, ‘so long as _you’re_ alive.’

Outside, you hear the pattering of hooves coming up the front pathway as Dr. Chopper returns from his doctor’s visits around the grove. A breeze sweeps through the room, and you watch as it ruffles the cook’s hair and blows the smoke away from the burning tip of his cigarette; the pages of the book on the windowsill flip over, picking themselves up from where they had left off before. You look at the cook, and think of the mirage that had stamped itself into the back of your eyelids before; the old man’s silhouette overshadowing the cook’s figure and making them look as one. 

The front gate creaks. Dr. Chopper’s voice cheerily floats through the open window, ‘I’m back! What’s for dinner?’

The cook heaves himself to his feet. He hasn’t said anything to you, but he doesn’t need to—he’s grinning, his lips curling soft and content around his cigarette, and that’s all the response you need.

‘Lamb stew,’ the cook calls back out, and you lean back into the couch and smile.

.

.

.

When you finally reunite with Galen, there is understandably a whole lot of shouting and a whole lot of tears. Apparently you had been presumed to be dead for the better part of the last month, and the crew had been divided on whether to stay on the Archipelago in search of your body or to sail off after the bastard pirate crew responsible for your alleged death in a fit of revenge. Your crew’s unwavering loyalty to you in spite of everything almost makes you cry again when Galen tells you; it is only through sheer strength of iron willpower that you pull yourself together.

‘Everyone is going to be so happy that you’re alive and well,’ Galen tells you, and he means it.

He brings you back to where your crew has been hiding out, a sheltered cave found just off the coast of Grove Forty-One that is made safe by an entrance hidden by rock outcroppings that strategically shield its existence from those looking at it unless from a particular angle. They had been so damn close all along, you realise wryly. You don’t know how your crew managed to stumble across such a gem of a hiding spot—could have been intelligence, could have been desperation, could have even been sheer dumb luck—but you’re grateful that they did, somehow. Galen tells you that every single one of your twenty-five-member crew survived. You fight the urge to cry in relief.

The deafening silence that falls over your crew the second you walk into the cave with Galen is only dwarfed by the explosion of noise that erupts from them heartbeats later, what with half the crew falling over themselves to get closer to ensure that _is Captain really alive, oh my god, Galen you better not be pulling our legs, if you dug out some tasteless lookalike to make us feel better we are going to feed you to the sharks this time round for sure—Captain, is that really you? Holy shit, it’s Captain! _You gather as many of them into your arms as you humanly can every chance you get, and the tears come out for real, this time, the truth that your entire crew is _safe _and _together _and _alive _only hitting you once you see them with your own two eyes. There are some members lying on bedrolls at the back, of course, still recuperating from the more serious injuries from the awful fight because this is piracy and piracy is harsh and life isn’t as romantically rosy as all that, but Galen isn’t your ship doctor for nothing and he quickly assures you that they’re on the road to full recovery. You grasp the hands of those who are conscious enough to acknowledge you, and bend to press your forehead against those who aren’t, in silent apology and promise.

As if the day’s news couldn’t get any better, Galen then taps your shoulder and points you towards the back of the cave. The entrance to your crew’s hiding-place is narrow, but just wide enough to fit your ship through apparently, and you can’t help the crow of delight that escapes your lips as you bound towards where it has dropped anchor in the shallow waters at the back of the cave, the keel and hull unscathed and the mast and rigging looking none the worse for wear. You stroke the ropes of your ship and can’t keep the adoring grin off your face. Damn, the drawings of your ship that you showed the old man and cook really didn’t do it any justice.

You sit with your crew for the rest of the afternoon and catch up with them about what they have been doing for the past two months and how. It hadn’t been easy at the start, it seems, what with most of them heavily injured and unable to move to grab supplies and provisions, but they had managed, somehow, taking shift rotations for round-the-clock watch and going out to the market at unusual times of the day in order to not be spotted. Your crew’s a tough and enterprising bunch. You’re so proud. In return, you tell them all about where you’ve been, as well, about the old man, and the cook, and how they’ve fed you and clothed you and given you a roof over your head to recuperate and nursed you back to health. You tell them the funnier stories about what has happened under their roof, tales of how the old man and cook frequently go head-to-head in fights with some very creative insults, and enjoy the sound of your crew’s raucous laughter bouncing off the cave walls; but you don’t tell them too much about the dying old man’s illness, or the cook’s struggles, or the relationship that exists between the two of them, because there are some things that just aren’t yours to tell.

Time passes quickly, and before you know it, you look outside and see that dusk has fallen. Your chef has already started whipping up a hearty roast, slow-cooking it over a carefully contained fire with a savoury smell that has your mouth watering.

‘Dinner, Captain?’

You find yourself shaking your head. Getting to your feet, you dust yourself off. Your crew exchanges looks of surprise.

‘I’m going back to the house,’ you explain. ‘I can’t just leave without saying goodbye, and besides, I’ve got unfinished business there.’ You grin, suddenly. ‘I should bring you guys over, some time. The cook there makes the best damn food I’ve ever eaten in my life.’

‘Keep up with that kind of talk and you’ll find yourself starving onboard, you hear me, captain or no captain!’ Your cook hollers from where he’s tending the fire, sounding put-out, and you laugh, hard.

In the end, Galen ends up going back with you to the house. For one thing, you still need to discuss with him the strategies and plans for when you and you crew sail off again, and the sooner the details get ironed out, the better—you may all be alive and together now, but the New World is a treacherous place, and you and your crew need to be doubly prepared. Your last defeat has made you even more wary, and even if you’re not as scared as you used to be (thanks to the help and advice from the cook) there is nothing wrong with learning a little more caution and a little more intelligence from the last time. And anyway, Galen says he wants to thank the old man and the cook for having taken care of you all these weeks, on behalf of the entire crew.

‘It’s really the least we could do,’ Galen insists, looking for all the world the most sincere and earnest-hearted first mate of a pirate captain, with absolutely no ulterior motive whatsoever. You roll your eyes.

‘Just say you want to try the cook’s phenomenal cooking, you absolute liar,’ you punch him playfully on the arm, and Galen laughs and admits to being guilty as charged. 

When you walk through the doors, the cook blinks at the company you have at your side (you had told him that you were going out that morning, but you didn’t necessarily specify for what), but his face immediately softens in understanding and he turns around and starts whipping up another plateful of food with nothing more than a ‘hey there, dinner will be ready in ten minutes’. The old man, when he comes down the stairs for dinner, scrutinises Galen in a way that has his knees trembling, but when Galen straightens his spine and stares back with all the defiance that made him a pirate, you think you see the old man almost nod in approval. Dr. Chopper is initially cautious in the presence of someone new, but the minute Galen mentions that he’s a doctor, he and Dr. Chopper bond almost immediately, discussing medical treatments and remedies right up until the cook puts food on the dining table. It’s noodles this time, lightly-spiced and with a smell that has Galen drumming his fingers with impatience underneath the table.

Dinner is a warm and noisy affair. Everybody is telling stories, and everybody is laughing, miraculously enough: loud barks from the old man and chuckles from the cook when Galen describes the time you accidentally got squirrelled away by a large near-sighted albatross who thought you its young, Dr. Chopper’s high peals of laughter when you counter with the time Galen accidentally proposed to the prince of a remote island by throwing an apple in front of his path on a Wednesday at high noon, Galen’s loud guffawing when the cook volunteers a story about how the old man once got on the wrong ship for a nap and subsequently cut it in half, your own hysterical laughter when the old man retorts with a story of how the both of them once had to compete in a gamble-fight with another pirate crew where the cook had to wear an absolutely ridiculous-looking ball on his head.

‘He looked like a right idiot,’ the old man says with a smirk.

This sets off an argument between the old man and the cook containing a slew of expletives that would put even the most pissy-mouthed of sailors to shame. It’s the most harmoniously wholesome thing that has happened in the house since, and your mouth hurts from how you’ve been grinning so hard. There’s a quirk to the cook and the old man’s lips, too, even as they fight like two rats in a trap; a sense of normalcy, perhaps, of some sort of balance being restored in the world through their fighting. Even Dr. Chopper isn’t bothering to hide his relief as he looks from the old man to the cook, in spite of his yelling at them to quit it out of a sense of decorum and politeness to Galen as a guest. 

‘Wait, wait, so what about the fight?’ Galen interrupts.

You glance at him briefly; Galen’s tone is easygoing and there’s an amused smile to his lips, but the intense look in his eyes is one you know he normally reserves for figuring out something particularly complex or intriguing. You wonder what that’s all about, but a quick once-over lets you know that Galen’s posture is relaxed and unguarded, so there isn’t any immediate threat around the group at the moment. You shrug and turn back to your noodles. Galen has always been the more book-smart between the two of you, more well-versed in general knowledge or in history or with keeping up with current affairs and that sort of thing, so you leave it up to him to figure things out. If it’s anything important, he’ll tell you later. You’ve never been one to think too much about anything whether for better or for worse, after all. 

Perfectly timed, as though of one comedic mind, the old man and the cook turn to Galen and snarl, ‘we won.’

You burst into laughter again at that.

Bowls and plates are cleared away, and dessert is served: a warm and rich chocolate lava cake that has you, Galen and Dr. Chopper asking for seconds, something which the cook acquiesces to with a proud grin. Outside the night presses itself dark and balmy against the glass window panes, stars studding the sky like precious stones, and that paired with the warm food and warm conversation and warm lights found within the four walls of the house has you feeling the most at peace you have been in months. The cook clearly thinks so too; the smile on his face may be hidden by his cigarettes, but you catch them anyway, all the more precious for their sincerity. The old man sees them too, if his own smirk is any indication.

Things aren’t quite so rosy, of course. The old man is still dying, and the world is still an awful and treacherous place, and your crew is still struggling to recover from the latest setback and its aftermath. But this is the closest you’ve come to believing that things will eventually turn out alright in a long while, and so even if the old man’s voice rasps at the end of his sentences, well, you don’t mention it.

.

.

.

You wake up that night to the sounds of someone shouting.

You scramble up the stairs with Galen not too far behind, almost tripping over your own feet in your haste. You and Galen stayed up late after dinner to go over plans for entering the New World, and it seems that the both of you fell asleep at the dining table without realising it. Bursting into the old man and the cook’s bedroom, you and Galen are just a few seconds later than Dr. Chopper, but those seconds are enough time for Dr. Chopper to scramble up and beside the old man who is lying in bed as still and unmoving as stone no matter how much Dr. Chopper or the cook beside him tries to shake him awake. Your heart lurches and collapses to the bottom of your stomach, and reality, harsh and unforgiving, crashes into the room.

_‘Chopper, he isn’t breathing, I woke up in the middle of the night and he wasn’t fucking breathing, what the hell is happening—’ _

The shouting that had woken you up previously had come from the cook. You have never seen him look like this before, so helpless and afraid; his hands are moving everywhere, anywhere, shaking at the old man’s shoulders, arms, neck, torso, anything, something, anything at all, but his hands are so unbearably alive and moving next to the old man’s immobile body that you can’t stand to look at them. You don’t think the cook can either; his jaw is clenched so hard that some distant part of you is honestly surprised that it hasn’t shattered, but like staring right into the eye of the sun, the cook refuses to turn his gaze away in fear that he might miss something.

Next to him, Dr. Chopper’s voice is crisp and seemingly business-like. But there’s a nearly imperceptible yet tell-tale shake to his body, and the pitch and tip of his voice tells you that the reindeer doctor is close to something like heart-break and hysteria. ‘His heart isn’t beating,’ he says, and the cook flinches bone-deep at that statement; you flinch right along with him, ‘so I’m going to administer some drugs and then jump-start his system in order to hopefully shock his heart back into working again.’

Galen immediately steps forward to help, offering his services and wasting no time in preparing the drugs from Dr. Chopper’s seemingly bottomless medical bag as Dr. Chopper warms up the defibrillators and prepares for the emergency procedure. You want to help, but you feel as though your body is made of lead, and your feet are stuck to the ground as though they would be physically impossible to lift no matter how hard you try. You can barely hear Dr. Chopper’s barks of instructions through the white roaring noise in your ears; your eyes cannot move away from the old man’s chest. It is so _still. _

But your eyes flicker to the cook’s form, still in bed next to the old man staring as though willing his eyes to tell him this is all a lie, and you grasp enough of your faculties to say, ‘Cook—cook, come here.’

You realise that you still haven’t learned their names.

The cook’s head snaps up, and his eyes rove around the room wildly before finally settling on you. You remember who else calls the cook by that name and your heart clenches hard in both pain and apology, but the cook gets up and goes to your side anyway. He moves slowly, with great difficulty, as though he is underwater.

When the first shock is administered, the old man’s body jumps off the bed; the suddenness of the movement has you clenching your hands so hard that your fingernails score deep ridges into your palms. You clasp your hands together, to stop them from doing that again; almost like in prayer, wishing so hard you’re shaking with it, _anything, something, anyone. _

The cook’s hands are clenched too. Skin stretched bloodless as bone across his knuckles, he grinds his teeth and stand next to you as unmoving and stone still as statuary, staring at where Dr. Chopper is dealing shock after shock to the old man’s—the old man. His lips are moving. You wonder if he’s praying too, but when you concentrate and listen, all you hear from his mouth is a string of curses, each more colourful than the last, cursing the world, the old man, himself, anything. At once the most open defiance, at the same time the most devout supplication. You squeeze your eyes shut. You pray. On any gods that would listen, you pray.

_‘No, no, stay with me, stay with me—’ _Dr. Chopper’s voice is rising into a wail now, voice edging itself openly into the hysteria that he was probably trying so hard to avoid; your heart drops grey as a stone and twice as heavy, _‘no, stay with me, stay with us, you have to stay with us, you can’t leave, almost everybody has left and we’re the only ones left now, don’t leave us, don’t leave me, don’t leave_, Zoro!’

The cook beside you jerks at what must be the old man’s name, and like a puppet with all its strings cut, collapses to his knees.

Dr. Chopper turns around at the sound. With his face crumpling into itself, the fur on his cheeks wet with tears, the doctor has never looked both younger and older than at this very moment. ‘Sanji,’ he hiccups, voice watery and thick with misery, ‘Sanji, I’m sorry, I couldn’t save him, I did everything I could, Sanji, I don’t know what to do, I’m a doctor but I couldn’t save him, I couldn’t save Zoro, Sanji, I’m sorry—’

You finally learned their names. Your shoulders shake. You hadn’t wanted that information under circumstances like this.

Galen lays a hand on Dr. Chopper’s shoulder. ‘You did everything you could, Dr. Chopper,’ he says gravely. His eyes are flickering between the cook and the old man. The air in the room is grey-black as mourning.

And then the body of the old man jolts as a stuttering breath of air is heaved back into obstinate lungs, and everything breaks loose again.

Dr. Chopper all but shoves Galen aside in his haste to check on the old man’s vitals and to get a diagnosis of the situation; the cook is staring from the ground as though he can’t quite believe what is happening in front of his eyes. A breath is punched out of you in a gasp, and you whisper gratitude to anything or anyone that might hear it, _god, thank you, thank you. Oh, god, thank you. _

The rhythm of the old man’s breathing is existent but unsteady; you can hear the effort it takes for the old man to drag air back to his unwilling heart, but he does it doggedly anyway, persistently and without fail despite the pain it must be causing him. Dr. Chopper moves a stethoscope frantically over his chest.

‘Anything that can be done, Dr. Chop—’

‘I’ll have to do an emergency procedure,’ he says, his eyes never leaving the old man’s body.

‘What is it? Maybe I can help—’

‘It’s a procedure I developed myself only recently, so there isn’t anything that you can do,’ Dr. Chopper interrupts again, and has the grace to throw a mildly apologetic look at Galen even as he rushes over to his medical bag and starts pulling out things. ‘All of you being here will just be a distraction, so please get out of this room and do not come in untiI I call for you.’

You protest. ‘But—’

‘You heard the doctor.’ The cook’s voice is quiet as he heaves himself to his feet.

‘We’ll only be in the way. Let’s go.’

There’s something to the tone of the cook’s voice that has you shutting up and meekly following him out of the door. Galen, seeing himself outnumbered, did the same. The door shuts behind you with a resolute _click; _the last thing you hear is Dr. Chopper, saying to the old man currently groaning in pain, ‘Zoro, I’m going to give you an anaesthetic now, you might feel a small prick but that’s fine—’

The three of you stand in silence in the shadows of the landing for a few seconds.

‘What do we do now?’ You ask, voice small.

The cook flicks out a lighter that he seems to have pulled out of nowhere and says, ‘now, the only thing we can do is wait.’ He lights the cigarette in his mouth, blows out the smoke. The lit ember end trembles in the dark.

‘Let’s go downstairs,’ the cook suggests.

‘Okay,’ Galen agrees. ‘And then maybe we can talk about you, Black-Leg Sanji of the Straw-Hat Pirates?’

Startled, you turn your head to see Galen staring at the cook as though he’s a hazy puzzle that he’s struggling to see clearly. You have no idea what is going on. The cook laughs once, wearily.

‘Of course,’ the cook agrees. ‘I’m sure you’re very curious about what this whole situation is about. I suppose there’s no more hiding it. Let’s head down to the kitchen; I’ll make some tea.’

.

.

.

_‘Then let’s begin.’_

_‘Wait.’ _

_You don’t have to turn around to know who it is that just spoke; there’s only one possibility, and anyway, you would recognise his voice anywhere. _

_You sense, more than you hear, him coming up to stand beside you._

_‘I’ll do it instead.’ _

_Your head snaps to look at him, looking placid and unruffled despite the blood running down his face and dripping off his jaw. _

_He doesn’t look at you, but addresses the doctor instead. ‘Out of everyone here, I’m your best option strategy-wise. Everybody else has roles to play that can’t be compromised with a side-mission like this one; we can’t afford to lose out on the other parts of the plan. So, let me do it instead.’ _

_‘What are you doing?’ You growl, angry. _

_He glances at you out of the corner of his eye. ‘I’m right, and you know it,’ he says. ‘Don’t even try to argue with me on this one. You said it yourself, we can’t give up here, right? If this is the only chance we have, we need to bet it on the highest chance we’ve got. And that highest chance is me.’ _

_You breathe out through your nose, slowly. You have never been more incensed and more afraid. _

_The doctor’s eyes flicker between the two of you, but he nods briskly in agreement. ‘You’re right,’ he says, and you whirl around to glare at the doctor in barely-concealed betrayal. _

_‘Of course I am,’ is all the insufferable man standing next to you says in reply. He steps forward. You catch him by his wrist. _

_‘Are you sure about this, cook?’ You ask, voice low. _

Do you understand what you’re giving up. Do you understand the sacrifice you are about to make.

_You hear him scoff once. ‘I don’t want to hear a lecture about sacrifice from _you, _of all people,’ he says, and you can’t say anything to that, not in the face of the past two minutes ago, not in the face of a shared past even further before that. He turns around. _

_‘Zoro,’ he says, using your name for the first time since this entire conversation has started. _

_‘This is our duty to our captain. You know this has to be done. And you know I’m right. So stop being stubborn, and just let me do this. We can win. Luffy’ll become Pirate King, and we’ll have done what we were supposed to do as the Straw-Hat Pirates. Loyalty and duty to our captain, remember?’ He grins suddenly then, in a way so broad and beautiful that it makes your heart ache. ‘Consider this payback for the last time, too. You robbed me of my turn to sacrifice back then; now I rob yours. With this, we’re finally even.’ _

_You search his face. He waits patiently, meeting your gaze eye-to-eye, never once breaking eye contact. Wanting you to understand that he understands. _

_Without saying anything, you drop your hand away. _

.

.

.

‘So. What do you want to know?’

The tea is steaming hot and orange under the kitchen lights, which are the only sources of light coming from the room when the rest of the house is shrouded in dark shadows. They’re not as vivid as the lit end of the cook’s cigarette, though, from where it is smoking thinly between the cook’s teeth. The cook pushes the teacups towards you and Galen in invitation. Obediently, you take it and sip. It’s perfect; of course it is.

Galen leans forward. His cup is ignored. ‘Are you really Black-Leg Sanji?’ He asks, intense.

The cook grins at that. ‘The very one. I haven’t heard that name in a very long while, though.’ He dips his head in a funny little bow. ‘Black-Leg Sanji, at your service.’

‘Okay, tell me _what is going on,’ _you interrupt, at the very end of your patience. ‘What are you guys talking about? Who is Black-Leg? Why is this even _important?’_

The cook raises an eyebrow at you. ‘As I thought,’ he murmurs. ‘You really have no idea.’

Meanwhile Galen is looking at you in a way that can only be described as appalled dismay. You’re slightly offended; you’ve never been one to enforce hierarchy and respect and all that stuff, but it should be breaking _some _pirate code or law to look at your captain _that_ disappointedly, right? And anyway, shouldn’t Galen already know that _knowing _things isn’t exactly your forte, you two have been sailing together forever after all. You handle the action-and-fighting stuff of things, and Galen handles all the intelligent-thinking stuff. It’s always been that way.

‘Captain,’ Galen says, slowly, ‘do you not know _anything _at all about the previous Pirate King’s crew?’

You frown. ‘Not really. I know they were all really strong? Which should be obvious, though, you couldn’t have become Pirate King without a strong crew.’ You scrunch your face up. ‘And they had—they had a lot of allies? A lot of ships under the main one, or something.’

The cook barks out a laugh at that. ‘They called themselves that, yeah. Straw-Hat Grand Fleet or whatever; but Luffy didn’t actually recruit them, they all just kind of decided for themselves to follow him wherever he wants to go.’ The cook shakes his head fondly. ‘Well, not that that is any different for the rest of us.’

‘What?’ You’re confused.

‘The last Pirate King was the infamous Straw-Hat Luffy, who was the captain of the second pirate crew in history to ever sail around the world to Raftel and find the One Piece.’ Galen explains. ‘Not counting the Straw-Hat Grand Fleet, and a whole host of other allies they found along the way, the Straw-Hat Pirates were noted to be an unusually small crew, ten people in total. Among those ten people, three of them were called “the Monster Trio”, known for their strength and fighting prowess even within a crew of already extraordinarily powerful people. One of them was their captain, Straw-Hat Luffy himself. Out of the other two, one of them was Pirate Hunter Roronoa Zoro. And the other one—’

And here Galen’s eyes flick to the cook.

‘—and the other one was Black-Leg Sanji, formerly of the Vinsmoke family, fighter and cook of the Straw-Hat pirate crew,’ he finishes, quietly.

‘I don’t consider myself as having ever been part of that damn family, for the record,’ the cook drawls, oblivious to the stunned atmosphere that hovers in the room. ‘I couldn’t give them two shits. Except for my mother, and maybe my sister. The rest can go to hell.’

You gape. You frantically dart your eyes to look at the cook, who is sitting there calmly smoking as though it wasn’t just revealed that he used to be _part of the previous Pirate King’s fucking pirate crew. _Your cup of tea is steaming innocently on the table. You stare down into it. Holy shit, you lived with and ate with and slept in the house of the last Pirate King’s right-and-left-hand men and you _hadn’t even known. _

While you reel from all this new information, Galen narrows his eyes at the cook. ‘Black-Leg Sanji was last recorded at All Blue, serving as head chef to a restaurant called the Baratie,’ he says, suspicious.

‘Oh, I was definitely there,’ the cook reassures him. ‘Served as head chef for about thirty years or so, made the place the best damn restaurant there had ever been. But when my old geezer—my father, my actual one,’ the cook clarifies, when he sees Galen’s confused expression, ‘passed away, I handed the restaurant off to someone I trusted and came here instead. Needed some time to myself, things like tha—’

‘Why—you never—all this time—why didn’t you _say anything?!’ _You burst out, interrupting the conversation mid-way.

You are very clearly not talking about the restaurant. But the cook only looks at you for a moment, before he gives a deliberately careless shrug.

‘We decided that if you never found out, we were never going to tell you.’

By _we, _he means him and the old man. You feel a pang in your chest.

‘For one thing, our location here in Sabaody is supposed to be a secret.’ The cook taps the ashes out of his cigarette. ‘We’re still wanted men with bounties on our heads, and we’re far too old to want to deal with uppity Marines or bounty-hunters or even other fellow pirates every day when they come charging at our door looking to start a fight. And besides—’

And here the cook shifts, looking off to the side with his bangs covering his face, ‘—it was nice talking to somebody who didn’t know our names for a change.’

_Oh. _You think, your indignance and anger at being kept in the dark immediately snuffed out like a candle in the wind, _oh, I see. _

They’re pirates, of course, but they’re still human. Roaring infamy is all well and good as pirates on the seas—people who choose this life choose it for a reason, after all—but some days, it might be nice to just be another face in the crowd. To not have to meet someone and know that your history is tagged right on your face for everybody to scrutinise and see.

Next to you, Galen is frowning. ‘But this doesn’t make sense,’ he says. ‘If you’re really Black-Leg Sanji…the last Pirate King conquered the seas nearly sixty years ago. But you,’ Galen’s eyes narrow, ‘you look exactly the same as you did back then.’

The cook huffs a laugh that is as resigned as it is amused. ‘Yes, I do.’ He agrees. ‘But that’s because I haven’t aged a day since Luffy became Pirate King.’

‘…I don’t understand.’

Smoke curls out from the end of the cook’s cigarette, wispy and incorporeal and seemingly not all there. It reminds you of the swirl in the cook’s eyebrows, all of a sudden. There’s a curl to the cook’s mouth too—a half uptick of a smirk, ageless in both its melancholy and grace, and you can’t stop the shiver that runs through you in that moment. The cook has never seemed more unreal.

The silence hangs in the air, broken only by the ticking of the kitchen clock.

‘I’m immortal.’ The cook’s voice is quiet. ‘The last user of the _Ope-Ope_ Fruit performed the Immortality Operation on me, and I’ve been unable to age since.’

The words hang themselves in the air, brutally naked in their honesty under the yellow kitchen lights. You can’t breathe through the shock that has punched you in the chest; you look at the cook now, with his hair slicked to golden without a grey strand in sight, with his smooth fair skin unwrinkled by neither time nor old age, and in your mind his behaviours slot themselves into place. The flash of a heart scar through an unbuttoned shirt, the cook’s tireless and unending smoking of cigarettes, the old man and the cook’s smirking and laughter whenever the cook’s age is brought up—oh god, in terms of the number of years lived, the cook is actually the old man’s age, isn’t he? When you first met the cook you had thought that the cook looked not a day over thirty and it turns out that that’s because he actually _isn’t; _but at the same time, at the same time, he is actually so much older than that. The cook looks not a day over thirty but he has seen and lived through things some men twice his age haven’t even _dreamed_ about, his soul one that’s aged and older than old. The cook will never age, but only physically, because he has aged in experience from sixty years ago and will continue to age still, tirelessly and relentlessly, never ceasing for an end.

‘Why?’ You finally ask, and though try as you might, you cannot push anything louder than a whisper past your lips, stunned and horrified as you are on the cook’s behalf. _Why? Why did you do it? _

‘It had been necessary, back then.’ The cook’s face doesn’t show an inch of remorse or regret. ‘We were on Raftel and in the middle of the biggest, most suicidal fight that we have ever gotten ourselves into. Which, for us Straw-Hat Pirates, is really saying a lot.’ The cook chuckles once. ‘We had to regroup ourselves halfway through the fight to come up with a counter plan because we had been severely compromised by our enemies.’

‘…The fight on Raftel back then has gone down in history as the ugliest battle between the major world forces anyone has ever seen,’ Galen says, his face white with shock. ‘The Marines, the Seven Warlords_, _the Revolutionary Army, the Celestial Dragons, the Emperors of the Sea—everybody had been there fighting for something, everybody that remotely had anything to do with justice. Even now historians and academics can’t agree on an accurate representation of what precisely went down on the island; the only thing that’s clear is that at the end of it all, Straw-Hat Luffy was undeniably Pirate King.’

‘Mm.’ The cook’s gaze was dark. ‘I’ll spare you both the bloody details, but I really do mean it when I say that, back then, the entire world had been against us. Halfway through, we needed someone to go on a dangerous stealth mission, in order to break through the enemy’s defences and turn the tide in our favour. Thing is, all of us had been too severely injured by then to be able to do it successfully. Chopper was there, and he could have healed us, but—’ The cook shakes his head. ‘We didn’t have the time to wait for that.’

‘And so you did the operation.’

‘And so I did the operation.’ The cook agrees, unruffled. ‘Everybody else had their own roles to play; I was the only one who could’ve done it. The last user of the _Ope-Ope_ Fruit—’

‘Trafalgar D. Water Law,’ the answer seems to come out of Galen automatically. The cook’s lips quirk.

‘Yes, or as we call him, Torao,’ he says, and Galen screws his face up at that, as though he can’t decide between being amused or scandalised, ‘Torao was a doctor too, but he was also heavily injured at the time and he thought that chances would be better if he were to spend his last energy on doing the Immortality Operation on someone, than to die halfway through a normal healing operation and leaving all of us with no chance of winning.’

You look to Galen for clarification. Galen explains, ‘the Immortality Operation grants a person eternal youth, but it comes at the cost of the fruit user’s life.’

You’re shocked again. ‘But why—why would the doctor do such a thing?’ You ask. ‘He wasn’t a part of your crew, was he?’

‘No, he wasn’t. But he’d wanted to help make Luffy’s dreams come true, even at the cost of his own life. That’s the kind of effect Luffy had—he made people believe in him.’ The cook’s eyes are soft. ‘Luffy made everybody who met him believe that, no matter how big the obstacle or how powerful the enemy or how impossible the situation, somehow everything was going to be alright again. And he always did. Make things right again, that is. And so people believed.’

The cook takes a drag of his cigarette.

‘And so _we _believed.’ 

You look at the cook, but his gaze is distant and you can tell that his mind is somewhere far, far away; probably somewhere under the flap and furl of an emblematic pirate flag, his thoughts lost amongst sea-salt sprays and blood-soaked days of laughter and pain and dreams and _living, _fast and furiously and with an openly defiant bravery that you know only pirates out on the wild seas can ever experience. The siren song of the waves, shaking in his blood, still, after all this time; it is the life-pulse that all pirates live by. 

The cook snorts though, then, ruining the moment. ‘Mind you though, great feats of miracles aside, the stupid idiot was an absolute nightmare when it came to day-to-day life. Luffy had the stomach of a blackhole and gave no regard whatsoever to the rationing of food when out on the seas, so keeping him out and away from my kitchen and my fridge back then had been a battle all on its own, every single day.’ He grimaces. ‘I can’t even count the number of times I have found him sneaking in the kitchen just before mealtimes, the bastard.’

Well, that radically changes your image of the Straw-Hat Pirates’ captain. But the frown on the cook’s face is threatening to turn itself into a smile, one that is heavy and fond in its love, and so you don’t think there’s anything wrong, really. You remember the conversation between the old man the cook, that one night so long ago; _our duty to our captain. Even at the expense of myself. _You finally understand now, what the old man had been referring to. But now, after it all—

You stare at the cook. ‘What’s going to happen to you?’

The cook pauses in thought.

‘Well, I’ll keep on living, I guess.’ He says. ‘I can’t grow old, and I’m pretty much immune to most diseases or fatal illnesses, but it’s not as if I can never die. Chopping off my head would probably end me pretty definitively, for example. But I’m not going to actively seek that out or anything. I’ll just live until I don’t.’

Your heart aches. The way the cook says it makes it sound so blasé, but you know the cook better than that now. You can’t think of a worse fate than living while watching everybody you love die, one by one. And yet that is the fate that the cook had chosen for himself, sixty years ago. All in the name of his captain.

Abruptly, the cook’s head flicks to the side. You turn, too, just in time to see Dr. Chopper come halfway down the stairs.

‘He’s awake,’ Dr. Chopper says, quietly. That should be good news, but Dr. Chopper’s eyes are red and watery and you know then, even as your heart breaks, that it’s time. Dr. Chopper looks at the cook, and then at you.

‘He wants to talk to you.’

.

.

.

‘Pirate Hunter Zoro,’ you say by way of greeting when you step into the room.

Even while hooked up to bags of fluid, the old man manages to smirk. ‘Huh. So you finally found out. I was wondering if I was going to die without you ever knowing my name.’

You flinch at this blunt admission of the inevitable. Beside you the cook is awfully silent; you carefully do not mention the fact that you learned the old man’s name _while _he was dying.

‘How are you feeling?’ You ask.

‘I’ve been better,’ the old man says, and the fact that he’s said anything at _all _other than _fine _is significant in itself. He’s sitting straight up in bed, disciplined as he is, but he’s covered in a light sheen of sweat, and underneath his tanned skin the old man’s face is pale and drawn. There’s a rhythm to his breathing that suggests that he is regulating it through sheer force of will alone. ‘Chopper filled me in on the details. He said I was dead for a good twenty minutes before my heart started beating again. He’s done an operation, and for now I’m alive, but—'

The old man breaks off. Your heart clenches. You don’t need him to finish the sentence for you to understand. _But I won’t be for long. _

‘How long?’ _How long do you have before you’re gone? _

The old man glances down. ‘A few hours, at most.’

The words hang like a noose, loud as silence in the room.

‘…What time is it?’ The old man asks, finally, moments after that grim announcement, turning his head to look out of the window at the sky where it is still dark as night. But the edges of the sky are lightening, turning from blue-black to navy like dye creeping slow into cloth; soon, the sun will rise over the horizon. You open your mouth to reply, but the cook answers before you can.

‘It’s nearly dawn,’ he says, quietly.

The old man’s eye flicks over to where the cook is standing. His mouth thins. You remember that look from before, from when you had first arrived in this household; a look gentler than anger, sweeter than guilt, and this time all the more resigned because of fate. But there’s a steel edge to the old man’s jaw. He will go forward without being afraid.

The old man looks at you. ‘Kid,’ he says. ‘Come here.’

You fight down the lump in your throat that’s threatening to overpower your voice and every other part of you, and step forward.

The old man regards you for a moment.

‘Stop looking like that,’ he says, dryly. ‘It’s making me feel bad.’

You snort wetly, reaching up to scrub furiously at your eyes out of a sense of pride. ‘Yeah well, good,’ you say, and your voice only wavers a little bit, ‘maybe then you’d stay.’

‘You’ve only known us for two months, you know.’ He points out.

‘Shut up.’

The old man barks out a laugh. His voice scratches at the end of it.

‘You’re going to be just fine, kid,’ the old man says. There’s a half-smile on his face, small but genuine, and at the sight of it you feel your breath hiccup in your throat. The old man’s still alive and breathing in front of you but already he looks like a mythic thing, faraway and distant and going to a place that you won’t ever be able to reach out to for the rest of your lifetime, and abruptly then the tears rise unbidden, and they don’t stop. You wipe at your face, embarrassed and overwhelmed and absolutely furious about it, but your tears spill over your fingers and drip onto the floor, and you can barely see past your hands to the wooden floorboards swimming and wavering below you, and god, oh god, this is it, this is really it, isn’t it, the old man is going to die and you won’t ever see him again, and the loss hits you heavy and grey in the stomach and you cannot stop crying. It’s an ugly thing, this vulnerability, ugly and bare and honest in the way only love can be, and you hadn’t expected to feel like this but you _do_ so what can be said, really. You love the old man and the cook like parents you never really had, and now one of them is going to die. The old man is going to die. You know that you told the cook all those things about carrying loved ones in your heart and keeping them alive in your memory, but you never said that that meant the goodbye would be any easier to do. You never said that that meant the pain won’t cut as deep.

The old man looks alarmed. ‘Uh, hey—’

‘Oh my god, you suck at this,’ a voice says over your head, and a hand lands itself on your shoulder.

Even through your tears you can see the venomous look the old man shoots the cook’s way. ‘Shut it,’ he says, incorrigibly stubborn up until the very end. You would be heartened about this, except that it just makes you cry a little harder. The old man’s eye flickers to your direction; he looks impossibly concerned, which is all the more incredulous considering that _he’s_ the one hooked up to multiple bags of fluids with needles driven into his arms.

Then the cook is entering your line of vision, close enough that his blond hair brushes against your face and you can see the clear grey-blue of his eyes. He doesn’t say anything, but gently, with his hands, he wipes away your tears; and you’re reminded by this, too, of a time so long ago, when you had been hurting and scared and beaten down into the ground by the biggest setback you have faced so far in your life—and the cook and the old man had helped you through it all, helped you to pick yourself and your crew back up so that you could sail the seas fearlessly again. You still haven’t thanked either of them for that. But the cook’s presence is grounding, calming in the way he stands solid in front of you, and you’ve managed to stop crying now at least.

‘Easy,’ the cook murmurs, brushing the last of your tears away from the corner of your eye with the back of his hand. You hiccup, feeling like a child. ‘Feeling better?’

You nod, even as you sniffle.

‘That’s good.’ The cook straightens, and pats your head. ‘It wouldn’t do for you to cry. It’s just like what a certain someone said—we don’t lose, so long as we’re alive, right?’ The cook cocks a wry smirk at you. ‘And we’re still alive yet.’ 

To face the future bravely is what it means to be a pirate, no matter come what may. And so, you wipe your eyes and offer up a shaky grin. ‘Exactly. Whoever told you that must be the smartest person in the world.’

The cook snorts and rolls his eyes. You glance past him to look at the old man, who is looking at the exchange between you and the cook with a look of mild bewilderment.

‘Hey,’ you say. You can’t bring himself to call him _Zoro, _not when you have known him as _the old man _for so long.

The old man looks at you in silent question.

You brace your shoulders. You know it may not be anything more than brazen confidence right now, but one day in the future you hope you can stand strong and sure and prouder than the sky, the embodiment of true strength not just in power and glory but also in maturity and sagacity, just like the old man, and this here is your promise to it. You’re a pirate, dammit, a pirate with a notoriously high bounty and a viciously strong crew and a ship that had sailed you this far into the first half of the Grand Line seas, and so you won’t break this promise. This here, right now, is a declaration of your determination.

‘Once I conquer the New World, I’ll go visit your grave,’ you promise, chin tipped forward, and the old man’s eye widens before a shark-like grin, sharp and vicious as a swung blade, cuts across his face. He suddenly looks ten years younger and eternal.

‘I wouldn’t expect anything less,’ he says, and the pride in his voice makes you stand a little taller, to hold the expectation that has been pressed into your shoulders more firmly on your back. You’re not going to break under it. And if you do, you’ll stand up again. You don’t lose, after all, so long as you’re alive. 

You step away from the old man’s bedside, and head for the door. The cook and the old man have things to say to each other, now, and it’s not your place to stay. Outside on the landing, the Galen and Dr. Chopper are anxiously hovering; Galen looks at your face, still red from crying, and immediately panics, but while Dr. Chopper is concerned enough to offer some tissues and a few pats on your hand, his attention is mostly drawn towards the room, where the old man and the cook are now alone. The door is open. Neither the old man nor the cook move to close it.

The cook is standing next to the window. His fingers fish into the inside of his breast pocket for a packet of cigarettes, and the lighter’s flame is a small drop of orange against the window pane. The old man is watching the cook the entire time he does this, gaze focused as though he’s afraid he’s going to miss out on something if he so much as looks away. The gauzy white curtains hung deadened and still. Neither of them says anything.

‘…What do you want your funeral arrangements to be?’ The cook asks, finally, only after he has taken two long drags of his cigarettes and blown smoke rings into the air that dissipate from grey haze into nothing. The question seems to surprise the old man, who says nothing as the cook further prompts: ‘burial? Cremation? We can scatter the ashes over the ocean of your choice like we did with Brook’s bones. If you want more than one resting place like Usopp did, that’s fine too. I’ll be nice for once and fulfill whatever request you want.’ The cook quirks a half-smile. ‘I have all the time in the world, after all.’

After a moment, the old man answers. ‘Cremation,’ he says, scrutinising the cook carefully. ‘But don’t scatter it over the seas. Put my ashes and bones into an urn and bury it next to the others, with a stone monument.’ The old man reaches over the bedside table and pulls out its drawer with a quick flick of his wrist. His fingers only shake a little bit. After pulling out a few sheets of paper, he holds them out to the cook, who takes them and flips curiously through the pages. ‘I’ve actually written down the things I want done for my funeral, in order.’

The cook reads through the pages. ‘Wow, these are detailed,’ he says. But his eyes never skip a beat as they skim their way down the lines, and at the end he nods to himself. ‘Yeah, I can do this. I’ll get Chopper to help with it too.’

The cook glances at the old man. ‘For you to have such specific after-life rituals, though—I didn’t think you were the religious type.’

The old man frowns. ‘It’s not about religion,’ he says. ‘It’s about honouring the rites and the code.’

‘Right. Of course.’

They lapse into silence again. The cook looks out of the window.

‘So this is really it, huh,’ the cook says, his eyes never leaving the horizon.

The old man says lowly, ‘yeah.’ He searches the cook’s face for a sign of anything, but the cook looks inscrutably impassive, golden hair casting shadows over his face and eyes impossible to read. ‘Are you fine with this?’

The cook laughs once. ‘You’re the one dying here, shithead. Why are you asking me that as though I’m the one affected?’

‘Because you are.’ The old man’s voice cuts through the pretence, and the cook falls silent at that. ‘I’m going to be dead, it won’t make a difference to me. But you,’ the old man’s voice is quiet, ‘you’re the one being left behind.’

The cook taps the ash out from his cigarette against the window frame as he thinks of something to say. ‘It’s not as if things will change either way,’ he answers the old man, at last. _It’s not as if you would get to stay. _

The old man looks pained. It’s the most emotion that’s been on his face for the past two months. ‘Cook—’

‘Shut up,’ the cook interrupts. ‘I know.’

The cook turns away from the window, and walks over to sit next to the old man on the bed in three quick steps. The old man watches him do it. The bed creaks as the cook settles himself in; he stares at the wall opposite him for a moment.

‘For what it’s worth,’ he says, voice soft, ‘I’m glad you decided to show up here and move in with me, all those years ago.’

‘…Even after I told you loved you, a few years after?’ The old man asks.

‘Even then.’ The cook half-smiles. ‘I kind of knew already, anyway.’

The old man looks at the cook in a way that is so young that it is almost out of place in the weathered lines and sickly pallor of his aged face. His fingers, resting against the covers, twitch, and immediately they are balled into a fist; as though there was an action there that was thought of but then contained.

The cook notices. He scoffs. Reaching out easily, he rests his own hand onto the top of the old man’s; and when the old man unfurls his fist, slowly, hesitantly, the cook twines his fingers through the old man’s as though it’s the most natural thing in the world.

‘How long have we been doing this,’ the cook says, taking a drag of his cigarette, ‘that you’re still getting shy over doing something as simple as holding hands? Just because you’re dying doesn’t mean you get to go soft on me.’

The old man stares at their intertwined fingers as though it is something foreign. ‘Do you regret this?’ He asks.

‘Hm?’

‘This.’ The old man squeezes their fingers together. ‘Do you regret this?’

‘A bit late in the day to ask that, don’t you think,’ the cook says dryly. 

The old man glares. ‘I’m serious, cook. Do you regret it?’

The cook considers the old man for a moment. ‘What makes you think I regret it?’ He asks, quiet.

‘Because you’re—you’re _you.’ _The old man struggles to voice his thoughts aloud, the words clumsy and uncoordinated. ‘You’ve always been interested in women, always dreamed about having that one true love thing about meeting the one for you and settling down and having a life with her and—and all that dramatic romantic bullshit you were always spouting about back when we were sailing on the Sunny. I know that circumstances had changed, with the sacrifices we made—that you made—to help Luffy become the Pirate King, but still, all this time, do you—’

The old man has to break himself off as a gigantic coughing fit takes over his entire body. He hunches over in the bed, body wracked and shaking as the coughs tear themselves out of him wet like paper. His knuckles clench white around where he’s gripping the cook’s hand from the force of it all, but the cook doesn’t flinch, only grips back in response until the old man finally subsides.

‘It’s true that I do love women,’ the cook says, after the old man has calmed down. ‘They’re wonderful beings, and deserve to be loved and attended to and adored.’ The old man scowls. ‘But—’

The cook glances at the old man.

‘I don’t regret this,’ the cook says, and means it. ‘If I had to go back to the one decision that started all of this, I wouldn’t have chosen any different. Not just because it was something Luffy needed. All of this may not have been what I wanted. But,’ the cook squeezes the old man’s hand, ‘I didn’t regret any of it, either. So no, I don’t regret this.’ 

The look on the old man’s face makes him look twenty-one again. The cook looks down at their entwined fingers; the expression that takes over his own face is soft in its melancholy and weary.

‘What I do regret, though,’ he says, ‘is how I could never—’

‘Cook,’ the old man interrupts. ‘I’ve told you before. It’s fine.’

The cook looks almost reproachful. ‘You could’ve had something,’ he argues. ‘Someone who could’ve loved you back the way you loved, someone who you could’ve spent the rest of your life with knowing that he loves you, and you love him. Not me. Not someone like me, who—’

‘We’ve had this discussion. I didn’t _want _something else. What we had—that was enough. That’s all I ever needed.’

The cook casts his gaze down. ‘Even now?’

‘Even now.’ The old man’s voice is resolute. ‘If you had asked the me from thirty years ago to make the decision all over again, I still would’ve chosen to come here and spend the rest of my life with you, regardless of whether you loved me back or not. I don’t _need_ that from you. What you’ve given me is enough for me. I love _you, _you moron. It’s not that hard to understand.’

The cook’s eyes are shiny; but maybe that’s just a trick of the light. ‘You never were that smart,’ he murmurs, glancing away and shaking his hair so that it falls over his eyes.

The old man’s eyes are glassy too, but not from any overwhelming emotion. The cook notices this, and even as his lips press themselves together bloodless, he is uncharacteristically gentle as he reaches over with his free hand and lays the old man down onto the pillows. The cigarette is clenched carefully between his teeth. The old man goes down without much complaint, his breath slipping out heavy and rasping as he fights to take an extra breath, and then another. Stubborn, even until the very end.

The cook gets the old man lying on his back, and then hovers over him for a minute. Then, deliberately, carefully, he pulls his cigarette from his lips, bends over, and kisses the old man on the lips. The light filtering into the room through the curtains is still a hazy muted blue, but outside, outside, the sky is lightening, turning itself from dark navy to soft quiet violet, shot through with thin wispy trails of grey early morning cloud. The old man and the cook’s fingers are still interlaced. Smoke curls from the end of the cook’s cigarette, the lit tip burning low.

When the cook pulls away, the old man is looking at him in shock. ‘You’ve never done that before,’ he says, his voice rattling in his chest.

‘There’s a first time for everything, I suppose.’ The cook says back. He smiles slightly, and it’s a lonesome thing, but strong in its resolution and farewell.

‘One last thing for you, for the road.’

The old man is frozen for a moment, but then he laughs. It’s a warm sound, and in spite of the situation it rings clean and low as a bell in the early approaching hours of the dawn. The old man brings the cook’s hand up to his mouth, and kisses the back of it. Closes his eyes against it all, a declaration of fidelity and loyalty and love, a _goodbye _and a _I’m going now _and a _I love you _and a _I’ll see you again, someday, maybe _all in one.

‘Thank you,’ the old man says with his eyes still closed, lips against the back of the cook’s hand, and the cook lets him do it, ‘that’s all I really needed.’

‘I’ll call in Chopper,’ the cook says, and the old man lets go without a fuss; watches as the cook steps over to the door and sticks his head out to call for the doctor, who is only two steps away from the entire situation and as a reindeer probably heard the whole thing. Dr. Chopper steps inside. You hover outside the door, but you don’t intrude; because you understand that this is a time for the old crew and their goodbyes, and it is not your place to be there. Galen lays a comforting hand on your shoulder. Your cheeks are wet.

The low murmur of conversation floats itself out of the door. And by the time the sun finally breaks itself golden over the horizon, the rising light and brightness spilling itself over the edge to chase out the dark shadows along the landing and inside the room, Pirate Hunter Roronoa Zoro of the Straw-Hat Pirates—the old man—is dead. 

.

.

.

In the wake of the old man’s death, the house is left to pick up the pieces.

There are things to pack up in the house. Second sets of plates, second sets of clothes, the weights in the backyard that only the old man had ever used to train with, sword polishes and cloths and whetstones and other things that the cook will never need to use. The cook’s hands as he puts items into boxes to store away in the attic of the house are methodical, measured, systematic; as if every bowl he stacks is settling a brick in the foundation of his resolve, every robe folded and smoothed over another acceptance of a conclusion. The only thing that the cook doesn’t pack are the three swords that the old man had always kept strapped to his waist—they were next to the old man when he’d died, and there they will remain until it is time to do the funeral rites.

(More than once, you’ve walked past the bedroom with the door open and seen the cook running fingers along the length of the swords, always one in particular; always the one made of polished white wood, the lacquered edge of its sheath gleaming dully as if in grieving how its owner, lying next to it as though sleeping, will never wield it again. Every time, the brushing of the cook’s fingers along the sword feels as reverent and clean and clear as prayer.)

The cook doesn’t sleep in the bedroom anymore. The cook doesn’t seem to sleep at all now, period, what with the number of times you have gone down to the kitchen in the early pre-dawn hours of the morning only to find the cook sitting on the windowsill smoking what must be his fifteenth cigarette next to an overflowing ashtray. The blankets and pillow on the couch, where the cook is supposed to sleep, are always cold to your touch. In those days, the cook always turns to look at you coming down the stairs with a face that is pale from lack of sleep but resolute, and when he gets up to make you tea from the kettle, his hands do not shake. You don’t do anything more than the customary nags of telling him to sleep more or to smoke less or to stop being such an idiot, nags that serve less as actual advice and more as reminders to the cook that there are still people in the world that care, because you get it. Loved ones are carried in one’s heart and kept alive in memory, but that never meant the goodbye would be any easier to do, the pain any less cutting or deep. And so you get it. You leave the cook to his own coping mechanisms, and instead what you do is wake up earlier than when you would ever naturally do and sit with the cook in the kitchen in those cold early morning hours, cups of steaming tea in front of the both of you, silently and in unspoken companionship.

In between packing up things and coming to terms with devastating loss and not-sleeping and cooking everyday as per the custom (there’s still four people in the house including the cook, and damned if the cook ever stopped feeding someone), the cook is busy consoling Dr. Chopper, who has without fail fallen asleep every night with his fur matting thick with his tears, reduced by grief to a lonely child despite all his efforts not to be. More nights than not Dr. Chopper stays up late frantically poring over his medical tomes and jotting down more and more notes onto sheaths of papers that eventually cover the floor of his entire room, as if saying _sorry, I’m sorry, I’ll study harder, I’ll make up for what I lacked. _The cook has to lure the reindeer doctor away from his almost-obsessive reading with cups of hot chocolate and warm blankets with lights turned down low, _go to bed, Chopper, it’s fine, you did what you could’ve, Zoro wouldn’t blame you and neither do I, _and wait until Dr. Chopper drops off to sleep with a tear-stained face nuzzled into pillows before he goes down to the kitchen and proceeds to utterly ignore his own advice. You’d call out this raging hypocrisy, except that grief takes time to heal and grief heals in different ways, and so you leave them be.

You and Galen are busy too. Aside from helping out around the house and, for you, coming to terms with your own grief (Galen has willingly stayed up late with you without complaint on more than one occasion despite his usual rigorous adherence to a regular sleeping schedule), you also prepare with the rest of your crew to set sail for the New World, which will happen soon. You’ve fully recovered from your injuries, and in the weeks following the old man’s death so does everyone else’s; with the old man gone now there’s no more reason for you to stay.

Dr. Chopper and the cook plan on starting the funeral rites only after you leave, and you don’t begrudge them that. You won’t stay for the funeral rites. You don’t have the right. There are decades worth of history between Dr. Chopper and the cook and the old man that you can’t even begin to imagine, and you know that this final ritual, this last journey, is one that only they can make together. The cook told you, once, in one of those early mornings with his eyes hooded and his voice dropped down low, that he and the reindeer doctor are all that’s left now. They’re the last surviving members of their crew, a golden glory age writing its final chapters with them. Everybody else is dead and gone, dead and gone and buried, and now at this age it’s only a matter of time and fatalistic patience. There had been no bitterness in the cook’s voice when he’d said that, only the acknowledgement of something that is bitter, and the cook is matter-of-fact and straightforward and simultaneously so strong and fragile in inevitability. He’s so timeless, the cook, stretched out in dark dress-suit black in the light of those yawning hours, and your heart hurts all the more for it. You hope one day he could be buried, if he so wants to be.

Before you’re due to leave, you ask the cook and Dr. Chopper if they would like to meet your crew, and though the cook’s eyebrows jump up in surprise at such a question his eyes immediately soften and the cook says yes seemingly without any hesitation. Dr. Chopper is harder to convince and slower to agree; every request always has him glancing back in the direction of the darkened landing to the cook and old man’s bedroom where the door has remained mostly shut since the fateful day, guilt swimming in his brown eyes as though he is punishing himself for even wanting to laugh. But the cook gently wins him over with his own reassurances and reasoned arguments to the doctor’s excuses, and eventually Dr. Chopper acquiesces too, says he’s looking forward to meeting them.

Your crew welcomes them with open arms. A merry-making lot you all have always been, and a merry-making lot you guys will stay; the afternoon starts off with introductions and conversations that turn from polite questioning to full-out laughter, and by the time night falls, your musicians (they’re twins and actually your deckhands, but the fact that they can play the fiddle and the drums respectively is a bonus) have struck up a merry tune of an old sea-shanty that has everybody singing and dancing along, cheap liquor sloshing uninhibited in the air. The crackling fire set in the centre of the cave casts long flickering shadows on the walls, but within it its light blazes warm and bright—the atmosphere is jolly, and for that you’re glad. However, in the midst of it all, even as Dr. Chopper and the cook dance and sing with your crew amongst the laughter and the conversation and the music, they carefully do not talk about their past or the old man, and your crew in turn does not ask.

Your crew still doesn’t know the story. Some things just aren’t yours to tell. But the day after the old man died, you had showed back up to your crew with your eyes red-rimmed and brimming, and your crew had taken one look at you and had whisked you away to sit down with a blanket around your shoulders and a steaming mug of your favourite tea in your hands before gently prodding you and Galen for answers. Galen had simply told them that the old man had died and then pointedly left it at that. But there hadn’t been any need for further explanation. Your crew understands, and so your crew doesn’t ask. And for that, you’re grateful.

You think you will keep the cook and the old man with you for the rest of your life. Heavy as love, you will bear the weight of this burden like heaving the world upon your shoulders, and you will not complain for the weight. It had made you strong. It will make you stronger still.

But tonight, at least, you let your shoulders relax, and you smile at the antics of your crewmates and conspire with them to somehow stick a “Handsome Cook” sign to the cook’s back. (It’s tough as all hell; the man has the goddamn evading skills of a snake. You suppose this is what it means to be a member of the Straw-Hat Pirates.) True to your promise to your crew the cook graciously agrees to take over making dinner for the night, and the massive wok of fried rice with pork chops he whips up has your entire crew, especially your chef, practically worshipping the ground he stands on. Dr. Chopper is giggling and laughing with your helmsman in the corner, who judging from the look on his face is probably sharing with the reindeer doctor something downright scandalous for your reputation, but you can’t bring yourself to mind, not really. This is the first time you’ve seen Dr. Chopper really smile since the old man died, and for what it’s worth, the bruises under the cook’s eyes seem lighter today as well.

When the party is winding itself down for the night and half your crew has collapsed and is snoring away in a drunken stupor (you shake your head fondly, but let them be; there isn’t a lot of opportunity to be this relaxed when sailing out on the seas), you walk out of the cave to find the cook sitting on an outcropping and staring out across the ocean, the water spangled with the light from the moon and stars and the air briny with the sea breeze. You clamber up and sit right next to the cook, and you offer him the lighter that you had filched off your helmsman earlier.

‘For the record, I still think you should smoke less,’ you say, when the cook stares down at the lighter in surprise.

The cook barks out a laugh. ‘I’ll try,’ he says, and that’s as good as anything.

The two of you sit in silence for a moment. The only sound for miles around is the crashing of the waves, alongside the distant noises of your crew and Dr. Chopper. It sounds like freedom and contentment and making peace. It sounds like letting go.

‘I never got to say this, but thank you for saving me two months ago.’ You say, finally, finally, the gratitude that has been sitting in your chest ever since you first woke up in that golden sun-washed room scared and hurting finally making its way out of you, and now this finally feels like closure, like a chapter of your life completed and ready to be moved on, like conclusion. Your chest feels like it has been wrenched open. Like something letting go.

The cook is smoking a cigarette, as always, incorrigibly, incessantly, agelessly. That’s how he is always going to be. But the small smile that curls on his face is as real as any metamorphosis, and that’s all you wanted to see. ‘Of course,’ the cook says, as way of reply, and well, that’s that. 

.

.

.

The cook and Dr. Chopper see you off at the shores when you and your crew finally depart from Sabaody Archipelago for the New World. The cook takes the opportunity to admire the arches and bows of your ship, gleaming bright and fearless under the sunlight, and you swell with pride.

‘Damn, your drawings really didn’t do her justice,’ he murmurs, and you grin and tell him, _well, of course not, I suck at drawing. _

Both the cook and the reindeer doctor are wearing black today. Most probably once you’ve set sail, they’ll begin the funeral rituals for the old man immediately; and from there, the cook has told you that they will set sail themselves to bury the old man in his final chosen resting place, in his rightful place alongside the rest of the Straw-Hat Pirates. There are some other trips left to make after that in regards to tying up loose ends, after which the cook will mostly likely come back here.

‘I might visit All Blue again though, I haven’t been back in a while,’ the cook muses, tapping the mouth-end of his cigarette against his chin in thought. ‘Though thirty-odd years probably isn’t enough to switch out all the people on board the Baratie that might recognise me… maybe if I disguised myself. Or I might travel with Chopper for a bit, it’s been a while since I’ve done any sailing.’ Dr. Chopper absolutely beams at that idea.

You smile. There’s hope for the future yet. The address of Pirate Hunter Roronoa Zoro’s final resting place, the old man’s final resting place, is written on a piece of paper and tucked carefully away inside your pocket, and you look forward to the seas in front of you with a renewed sense of determination and a wiser sense of anticipation. A steadier sort of confidence, but no less fervent and no less real. This is still what you’ve always dreamed of. The world, still right at your fingertips, with a crew loyal at your back and a high bounty to your name—this is the romance of the future. You will step forward bravely, and with no regrets.

‘I’ll see you when I see you,’ you tell the cook and Dr. Chopper, boarding your ship, and the cook nods, smiles and agrees. Dr. Chopper calls after you to take care.

On your ship, you plant your feet to stand on the ship deck and do not take your eyes off of Sabaody in the horizon. You watch and wait, expectant. After a while, a white plume of smoke rises itself, languid and unhurried, from the Archipelago into the air. You follow it with your eyes, up to where it trails up to the sky and dissipates into nothingness, before pulling the address out from your pocket, holding it to your lips, and closing your eyes in farewell; then you turn around, put the address back into your pocket, and yell orders to your crew to move forward without looking back.

.

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.

_When Zoro steps through the open front door and drops his bags onto the floor beside it, Sanji doesn’t even turn around. _

_‘And what precisely are you doing here in my house, you absolutely moronic mosshead?’ He asks, as though there had been no distance of time between them at all. His hands that are cutting onions for tonight’s dinner don’t falter in their steady rhythm. Zoro doesn’t take offense to the insult like he normally would, however, because he notices that Sanji has set out two plates for the dining table instead of one. _

_‘Heard you left the Baratie.’ _

_‘I did.’ _

_‘Heard you decided to come to Sabaody and live here, of all things.’ _

_‘Clearly I did that too, unless somehow you fucked up so spectacularly in navigation that you still managed to find me while I’m supposedly somewhere else.’ The cook is still chopping. Smoke from what should presumably be the lit end of a cigarette curls up over his head. ‘That doesn’t answer my question. What are you doing here, Zoro?’ _

_The use of his name startles him. But Zoro doesn’t let that slip; only looks at the profile of Sanji’s back against the kitchen sink, the low sunlight filtering in through the kitchen window slipping over his eternally golden hair and pale skin, his unceasing and ageless figure. The cook looks exactly the same as he did thirty years ago, with all the same foul-mouthed sarcasm and chronic chain-smoking habits to boot, and he is still so fucking beautiful. Zoro loves him so much that he thinks that he might die from it. _

_Zoro looks down at his own hands. Already they have begun to wrinkle themselves, minimally but still there, and he knows his own green hair is beginning to streak itself in grey and there are crow’s feet in the corners of his eyes. Zoro knows what all of this means. He knows what this situation with the cook would mean. He clenches his hands into fists. Regardless, he makes his decision. _

_‘I’m going to move in, and stay here with you,’ Zoro says, lowly, eyes never leaving Sanji’s silhouette which is as black and lonely as a shadow in his lean pressed suit. Zoro thinks about past choices, thinks about consequences, thinks about love and the subsequent burden of it after and thinks about the two-storey house he is in right now that has too many rooms and not enough people to fill the spaces; thinks about the unlocked front door and the kitchen with the onions and the dining table with the plates set for two. Thinks about Sanji. _

_‘That fine with you?’ Zoro asks. _

_At the kitchen sink, Sanji’s hands stop for a brief moment, before picking back up again. _

__‘_Okay,’ Sanji says, after a long pause. If his hands tremble ever so slightly, well, neither he nor Zoro mentions it. ‘Okay.’ _

.

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**Author's Note:**

> LONG ASS AUTHOR’S NOTES COMING UP NOW: 
> 
> Honestly this fic started out only because I saw Rayleigh and Shakky together and had the idle thought, ‘hm loyal first mate standing with a lean and graceful chain-smoker, that sounds awfully familiar’, and then it just took off from there. It not only took off, it evolved its own damn wings and flew itself straight into the horizon, with a serious plot and examination of themes and everything. Halfway through writing this, though, I did realise I have zero to no idea how chronic or fatal diseases actually worked, so whatever you see here is just me vaguely gesturing around the words “HE’S DYING AND THERE’S NOTHING ANYONE CAN DO ABOUT IT” in the hopes that people will buy into it. If there are any medical professionals reading this fic, I apologise for any egregious errors and feel free to take it up with me in the comments; I’ll see if I can change it. (Additionally. Personally, I don’t buy into the idea that Zoro’s heart would be anything but like an ox’s—healthy and ridiculously strong—considering the kind of training regimen he follows and the shit he does on a daily basis, but well. He DOES drink alcohol like inhaling air. For the sake of this fic he has a fatal disease and you can’t do anything about it.)
> 
> By the way I hope you guys know that my explanation of the final battle for the One Piece in this AU is vague on purpose. The purpose being that I have absolutely no fucking clue about how it would pan out. There’s a lot of weak holes in it really, and if you really completely hated it let me know I guess because then I might finally sit down and flesh it out a bit more. 
> 
> The longest fic (and the longest thing) I’ve ever written in my life, and it’s for ZoSan. Which is interesting, because while I would say that I do ship it, at the same time I also don’t. I do think that the ZoSan dynamic is interesting in a lot of ways, but I also personally believe that, in canon, the possibility of them getting together is basically zero unless one exploits the more ambiguously-defined aspects of their characters, or just straight-up change them. That is not to say that any outright-established ZoSan fics set in canon out there is unrealistic; but they often worked with the premise that Sanji is either bisexual (which I wholeheartedly support), or a repressed gay man (which is fine by me, if given proper expansion), or the issue just isn’t addressed at all (which also works, really; I believe it isn’t the job of a fic, or any piece of fiction, for that matter, to explicitly address everything that undergirds the logic of the story). But I wondered about the possibility of ZoSan (or at least, some approximation of it) happening within canon while still adhering to the idea that Sanji is (almost violently) straight. And after a lot of thinking, this fic was my answer. Even then, I don’t think you can call this story straightforwardly ZoSan; it’s still ultimately one-sided, after all. (To a certain extent.) 
> 
> The answer can differ for everyone. Your interpretation of the characters of Sanji and Zoro might differ so vastly from mine that it cancels out the entire assumption that this fic rests upon, rendering it invalid to you. And that’s perfectly okay. I think that love can come in different forms, however; and Sanji does love Zoro in this fic, in his own way, it’s just that that way is not the same way as Zoro’s, and is not the same way as defined in romantic love. This fic also isn’t necessarily canonical either, since I don’t think the actual ending of One Piece will play out in any way like how it is described here. As I said in the notes at the start of this story: the end of One Piece has been quite prolifically modelled to suit the premise of this fic. That in part could explain the length of this story, actually; I was essentially creating an entirely different set of circumstances. 
> 
> Anyway! I hope you guys enjoyed this story! It was an adventure and a half to write this entire thing, and I really hope I managed to give the pairing and the characters justice. All my fics are a labour of love, this one Especially So, and it would be lovely if you guys would leave comments telling me what you liked or disliked about the fic :) Especially considering that this fic is like 6 times the length of my average fic…come talk to me about the Straw-Hat pirates, I love them to death. Do you want death headcanons? I have death headcanons for the Straw-Hat pirates. Whether within this AU or based off canon, come talk to me about death headcanons. Yell at me about this fic in the comments! I’ll try my best to reply. Alternatively I also have a [tumblr](http://guilty-lights.tumblr.com/), so you can drop by there and send me a message too if you want! 
> 
> Thanks for reading! 
> 
> [Time ended: 30th July 19, 2:57pm;– ]


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